XenXero: Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock was a pretty fun game that had a really cool campaign mechanic. In the story campaign, you play as the various rockers playing a setlist, and when you finished, they would transform into their Warrior of Rock form and perform an epic encore song. When you get to Judy Nails, a punk girl who specializes in Alternative Rock genres, her setlist includes such greats as "Seven Nation Army" by The White Stripes, "Losing My Religion" by R.E.M., and "Bohemian Rahapsody" by Queen, arguably one of the greatest songs ever written. Then she goes into her Warrior form and becomes a succubus-like demon to perform her encore. So what did they pick to follow-up on such a great setlist? JANE'S FUCKING ADDICTION! Personal feelings for the band aside, who is the idiot that thought it was a good idea to follow-up "Bohemian Rhapsody" with "Been Caught Stealing"?. To this day, that intro of two guitar notes and dogs barking is forever etched as the definitive sound of disappointment for me.

Advertisement:

MinisterOfSinister: My Dethroning Moment is from the Baldur's Gate series, the second game, specifically. There are a lot of moments in the series, including some from either Enhanced Edition version, that arguably deserve to be listed here, particularly a large number of severe Karma Houdini incidents, but I'm going with one from the original second game because it's the single most groan-worthy part of the series as a whole; specifically, the prologue portion of the game. In this prologue, it's made clear to you how your character acted in the first game — like a good guy. And your companions were all good guys too. It's one thing for them to include Imoen in your canon party — because she's Imoen — but the others can't hold a candle to her. It's a ludicrous, even egregious example of Railroading and Cutting Off the Branches, and given the amount of work they put into the rest of the game it smacks of laziness and not caring. How hard could it possibly have been to have given different parties for each alignment to allow people who chose Evil not to suffer the logical dissonance of having travelled with people who are completely at odds with you in terms of motivations and morality. Not to mention that one of those characters is Minsc, a character I patently hate, and the game pretty much forces you to take him along at risk of being crushed under the blows of a Clay Golem or two. Overall, this moment is the absolute nadir of the series and my only comfort is that there are no other moments like it.

Advertisement:

Namco: The last 10% of Suikoden V. While an otherwise refreshing game that wonderfully shows the implications of leadership of a queendom, the last bit is a horrid, horrid, Ass Pull to the story. Just after the last War battle, and fighting Allenia and Zahaak, the story spews out Ass Pull, just so Creator Pets Gizel and Marscal Godwin are redeemed. After having every last one of his plans destroyed, all of Falena against him after their Genocide plot, and even losing his home, I expected resident Smug Snake Gizel to go out into one of the biggest Villainous Breakdown in video game history. Instead, he goes off on a tangent about how the sun rune warped his and his father's minds into doing the worse things they did, and before you can call them on it, he then says they still knew what they were doing all along and were doing it for Falena's prosperity. There is so much wrong with this namely, they say the rune affected them because they were near it. There are many, many, times where you see scholars in the same room as the damn thing, and they aren't afflicted at all! and the Godwins spend maybe 5% of the time they are in the room with it. Hey, if it afflicts those near it, how could anyone ever approach the Queen without being influenced themselves? Gizel's death after his duel with the Prince is handled in such a way that Tearjerker is impossible. After everything he did to screw with every citizen of Falena, players are supposed to feel Sympathy for the Devil which is very hard to do after watching the Meanwhile scenes: his Smug Snake personality is Up to Eleven as the new Knight Commander. Despite the fact the game could have ended there (Lym even points out how dumb it is that there's still more to do), developers felt the need for a textbook example of Xen Syndrome with Ashtal Mountain. It is the Scrappy Level of the game (Minus Twilight Forest) with Let's Split Up, Gang which, filled with Demonic Spiders and while done before in ruins, this time apparently, the game needed padding for the dungeon of a boss (all That One Boss for bonus points) for each of the three parties (when you likely have maybe a party and a half of leveled characters to this point) and an extremely unsatisfying final boss which is a Giant Space Flea from Nowhere. Marscal taking the sun rune here is an absolute WTF moment. The final boss comes about because he's testing whether the Prince will be a good royal...except there's only ending in which he even becomes Knight Commander, and most probably shelled out for the 60-107 star ending. Afterwards, Lyon will die if you didn't 60 or more stars, or they will have a Disney Acid Sequence, and see the Prince's dead parents. What makes even this a fail? Zahaak and Allenia are there, and happy for them. The same girl who was going to kill the prince for Gizel is clapping for him. It is such a jarring Character Derailment for her after that it ruins the whole scene. Worse still, Gizel and Marstal are there, and happy as well, as if the whole thing was just for the Prince to be a better himself. This almost ruins it entirely because of how Out of Character everyone is. The final nail in the coffin? The antagonists are five feet away from Ferid and Arshtot, and they don't even so much as reprimand them, let alone call them out on everything they've done and how they haven't the right to act as if every death was just so the Prince could beat the Sun rune.

bulmabriefs144: In Dragon Quest IX, Marionette, having been animated by one of the Fyggs, is among the few characters to not actually transform into a monster. Possibly because the wish made was relatively unselfish, and perhaps because she wasn't actually the one to make it. Regardless, she tries to make friends as requested by his original owner Marion. After she is called a "monster" for standing up after apparently dead (dolls have no pulse, remember?) she lives just long enough to realize that she had no real friends for her trouble, tells the townsfolk that she is going on a trip, and is found lifeless near Marion's grave (having removed the Fygg from her body). The maid notices the doll Marionette, and drags her off unceremoniously. If you examine her after that, it just says "The doll just sits there lifelessly."

cricri3007: The ending. So all Celestrians go to Heaven? I guess they deserve it, for working for centuries for their God. What? The villain is totally redeemed? But he tried to kill God, resurrected an evil empire and abducted his fellow angels to power his minions up. And I, the guy who had to lose his holyness and become an human in order to defeat him, am rewarded with being the Guardian of the whole earth?! I call bullshit.

AnarchyBalsac: Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne has the True Demon Ending. You kill everything and everybody just to help some emo kid who's sore about getting his ass kicked grind his ax with God. Granted, God is supposed to be evil up until and through this game, but clearly you are too if you did this just to go after him.

Grumpy Old Man: I agree. Though Atlus may have been trying to make the point that working hard for someone who seems to be the good guy could backfire and turn you into a brainwashed monster, it was probably better presented in a way that didn't require long sidequests and an extra end boss.

Lord TNK: Resident Evil 2 may not have such Narm howlers as the first game, but that can make the bad acting even worse. It's not even So Bad, It's Good. Sherry frantically shouting about her father getting caught by the monsters, and the very next sentence having a neutral tone, was probably the worst for me.

ShinyVulpix: In Resident Evil The Dark Side Chronicles Alexia is ultimately responsible for Alfred's death, instead of Steve. Alexia killed him because "he didn't wake her up on time". This felt as a slap in the face for me. In the original game, Resident Evil  Code: Veronica, Alexia genuinely loved her brother and even tried to avenge him. It was this particular thing that gave her character some depth. Instead, they made her another hollow villain with no redeeming qualities.

Tropers/legomaniac90: If you think that's bad, wait until you see the bad end of Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City, where you kill Leon and Claire in front of poor Sherry, and no, fading to black before it happens doesn't help. But that's not the DMOS. The DMOS comes when the game ends there, with no look on how this could affect the future of the franchise. Nothing.

Dr Zulu 2010: In my opinion, Resident Evil 6 was the weakest of the series and the one who ticks me off for his ludicrous story; a major understatement in my part: mostly the Ada's doppelganger's subplot. Long story short, Ada has a clone who is in fact Carla Radames being injected with the C-Virus. Now, most clone stories I've heard has the people learned somewhere of the clone's existence and, if it is the Big Bad, stops his plans. But there, nobody except Ada acknowledge the clone's existence. Sure Jake is out of the case since he didn't see a lot of the clone and Chris is blinded by vengeance and, for all we know, the fake Ada is the one who considers like the real one. But, it is inexcusable in Leon's case since he saw a video showing the birth of the doppelganger. Considering that he knows Ada for a longtime, why didn't he say to Chris before they splitting up in Chapter 4 "By the way, there's an Ada clone roaming in the boat. You should be careful and not confuse her for the real one."?

willowoftheriver: For me, the hugest DMOS in the game was finding out that Sherry was retconned into having been in the custody of Simmons since Raccoon City. Her having been raised by Wesker, as indicated by Wesker's Report, would've left open so many fascinating directions to take her story and character, yet they decide to gloss over all those years and just say she was with some random government official who was only created for RE 6?

Redhead64: When I completed the Nintendo DS version of Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter I began to wish I hadn't. Why? Because of the ending. In short, what it shows is that the whole thing was All Just a Dream of minor character Mike, and everyone else (Save for Heather) no longer exists. All those characters and towns I saved over the course of two games and You just erase them all from existence?! This is how you end the series?! It's quite possibly the most jarring, infuriating, depressing and pointless ending I've ever laid my eyes upon! At least there's fanfiction...

InTheGallbladder: For me, it was Blaze's Heroic Sacrifice. I didn't like Silver, and turning a character I actually liked and thought they could do more with into his personal martyr didn't help.

Chimanruler15: The entire story was poorly written, but what annoyed me most was Sonic's Character Derailment. Of course, Tropes Are Not Bad, so completely changing a character is not necessarily a bad thing as long as it's done properly... but it wasn't. Throughout the story, Sonic, being an emotionless robot, shows absolutely no concern for anything and anyone besides Elise. He didn't even care that Silver tried to kill him twice, even though the subject was brought up four times. Apparently, someone you knew for only two days is THAT important. Here's the DMoS, though. When Sonic and his friends arrive in Soleanna after defeating Iblis in Flame Core, Shadow and Rouge are nowhere to be seen. While Tails reacts appropriately with concern, Sonic's response is nothing more than, "Those two can take care of themselves." Wow. If Sonic ever actually did care about anything besides Elise, then the writers did a very bad job of showing it. My goodness.

Maths Angelic Version: My least favourite moment is when Elise gives herself up to Eggman to "protect her people" when he threatens to destroy Soleanna. Of course, this turns out to be a terrible decision because giving Eggman access to the Flames of Disaster can help him conquer the world and tyrannize everyonenote To be fair, Elise probably didn't know that until Eggman explained it to her, but it should still be obvious that the guy who kidnaps you repeatedly will be dangerous if he gets access to the Flames of Disaster, so letting him destroy Soleanna would be the lesser evil. There's also the fact that Eggman has already double-crossed Sonic in the story, so he could easily decide to accept Elise's surrender, and then destroy Soleanna later anyway. What makes this moment even more insulting is that Sonic has spent all his story rescuing this stupid princess several times only to see her getting kidnapped again, and now she gives herself up?! Making Sonic's story about saving Elise was a dubious decision in the first place — one thing Sonic the Hedgehog usually has over Super Mario Bros. is that the "save the world from a mad scientist" Excuse Plot is cooler than the "save some stupid princess who gets kidnapped all the time" Excuse Plot — but the ending makes it particularly bad.

Dr Zulu 2010: Heck, just the reveal that Chaos, Zavok, Metal Sonic and Shadow were clones created by the Phantom Ruby and there is a whole lot of them is pretty insulting; Sonic Team has reunited quite a reunion of villains, for the 25th anniversary game nonetheless, and they weren't even the real deal and that came from someone who is pretty lenient in game quality overall (to the point that niche games with a metascore of 60 are considered playable).

Supreme-X15: I have issues with Infinite's backstory. I had the impression that Infinite was a mysterious entity and a dangerous villain, and his epic Villain Song implied as such. However, Episode Shadow reveals that he was once normal and had no powers. He called himself the Ultimate Mercenary who led a group of mercenaries aligned with Eggman, and they were easily defeated by Shadow, who also handed his cocky ass right back to him, calling him weak in the process. This lead to the "Ultimate Mercenary" throwing a tantrum, going insane, discarding his original self, and becoming Infinite with the power of the Phantom Ruby. Holy hell, I was so disappointed with this backstory. In the main game, he's meant to be the most dangerous and threatening villain Sonic and friends have faced, but he comes off an egomaniac and sadistic bully, especially to the Avatar. His boss fights are almost pitifully easy, and he's Upstaged by Eggman at the climax of the game, disappearing without a trace. I would love his character more if it wasn't for his backstory being so petty, his inflated ego being so fragile, making costly mistakes during the game's run, and being written out entirely by the end of the game. Sonic villains have always been entertaining, in one way, or another, but Infinite just generates less favorable feelings for me. Boring personality, and weak backstory, thy name is Infinite. At least I can still enjoy his theme song.

SenorCornholio: For me, it has to be the third-to-last level, Iron Fortress. To recap, you just stopped Infinite's illusion of the sun falling onto everyone, and you and Modern Sonic defeated him for the third and final time. Now you're ready to take down Eggman and save the world. Sooooo...how do we ruin that? It's quite simple, really; just follow these simple steps and you, too, can make a terrible climactic stage! Step 1: make it a Classic Sonic stage. I already mentioned in my last entry how badly Classic Sonic plays, and it's no exception here. But long story short: he drops like a rock, his controls are awkward, and he has no plot relevance otherwise. Step 2: put incredibly unfitting music in this stage. The background music is cheery beyond belief despite the fact that the war is entering its final stages. Whoever made this music was clearly not informed where it should go. Step 3: there's a random Auto-Scrolling Section at the halfway point of the stage. There's been auto-scrolling before, but using Classic Sonic's completely backwards controls just makes it even more difficult to deal with. If you're still not accustomed to this control scheme, be prepared to die. A lot. Step 4: combine this with the stage's main gimmick. Throughout the level are rotating wheels that launch Sonic if he Spin Dashes. Because you're auto-scrolling, you have barely any time to use them before you're pushed off the wheels and sent careening to your death. Bottom line: this stage sucks on both the gameplay and story fronts, and even though I accepted everything the game had to offer, for better or for worse, this was easily the game's biggest sin. I was right, Christian Whitehead should just take the reins on Classic Sonic for the foreseeable future.

Enchanter468: Let it be known that thus far I love StarCraft II, but one revelation really frustrates me. During The Reveal of the Bad Future, we learn that the Overmind, the world-devouringnightmare from the first game, didn't do any of said world-consuming of its own free will. Instead, it was forced to do that by its masters, and the Queen of Blades, implied in the first game to be the Zerg's ultimate weapon against the Protoss, was really created because she was the only way the Zerg could hope to be free of their enslavement. Not only does this Retcon contradict the way the Overmind acts in the first game's Zerg campaign (where it seems to be quite happy about its mission and never angsts about its children being "slaves"), but it turns an extremely coolBig Bad that turned against its masters and ate them before tearing across the galaxy with the desire to absorb the Protoss, into a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds with no free will of its own, which inevitably brings on a large amount of Villain Decay. I like the way the new Eldritch AbominationBig Bad is shaping up, but did Blizzard really need to neuter the Overmind to get us here?

Retloclive: For Starcraft II, something that really pissed me off was when Wings of Liberty came around where the Terran Dominion are portrayed as the evil empire where Mengsk rules with an iron fist... It's like Blizzard Entertainment totally forgot that throughout the Brood War expansion to the original game, Mengsk's Terran Dominion had gotten their butts handed to them by both the UED and Kerrigan's Zerg Swarm to the point that Mengsk had nothing left but ruins of his former empire by the time Brood War was over. Sorry Blizzard, but I'm never going to buy the fact that it only took the four-year interlude between the original games and Starcraft II for Mengsk's Terran Dominion to suddenly rebuild and become the Terran powerhouse again, especially when other Terran factions like the Kel-Morian-Combine, and the Umojan Protectorate, are just sitting there ready to step in and take advantage of the weakened state that the Terran Dominion was left in after Brood War. For me, this failure at world-building was the starting red-flag where I just knew right away that the Starcraft II trilogy wasn't going to be as good as the original games.

Jerrik: In the Neverwinter Nights module, Maugeter - The Keys to the City, the final mission. And what's truly a shame is that everything before it was pretty good. It was a module with a unique premise, with your character moving to a city divided into seven districts (kind of like Ba Sing Se), and slowly establishing yourself there. You are contracted to complete tasks, most often to deal with all the criminals robbing everyone in sight, even though the city guard is everywhere you look. You use the money, reputation, and opportunities you get from this to buy houses, join the mercenary guild, and most importantly, obtain the gate passes that give you access to the more important and prosperous districts. And then with the final mission, it all goes horribly wrong. When you are investigating a possible criminal hideout, you are suddenly knocked out, taken prisoner, and strapped to a machine that drains you of your power, with no chance to avoid this. Some wizard you've never seen before turns out to be behind this, and he also turns out to be responsible for every criminal in the game. He did all this, you learn, because he used to be a hero, but he overestimated himself and got beat up by a Beholder, so he started draining peoples lives for power so he could be strong enough to 'save the world' (from what exactly is never established), the criminal activity was just to supply him with money, and the whole thing seems to be some kind of poorly thought-out Take That! to every RPG ever. You are freed by one of the criminals you had fought earlier, and after helping you the guy goes to try to and kill his boss, dying in the attempt, without ever explaining why he's doing any of this. Then, after you kill the wizard, you are taken prisoner again, this time by the totally incompetent city guard, and thrown in prison. You get some weird dream sequence of waking up in prison and escaping repeatedly, only to wake up for real to find out that city officials, being totally embarrassed that they didn't notice one of their heroes going crazy and eating peoples lives, have decided to charge you with everything from trespassing to murder in an attempt to cover up what happened, have decided to exile you from the city, and will send you to fight in some pointless war they're having with a neighbour of theirs. You are given no opportunity to do anything about any of this, you lose everything you gained, everyone you helped just abandons you with a "It was nice knowing you" attitude, and the game ends with you being sent to fight and most likely die in some war you don't care about. Also, you never get to see the seventh and last area of the city.

Lily Nadesico: The end of the June mission in Valkyria Chronicles II, with Cosette going through a sudden Heroic BSoD for reasons that, while reasonable, end up seeming contrived and artificial within the plot of the game (she had healed people before, where does that fear of blood come from? And she's a medic who has a fear of blood? What gives?) and Avan shooting himself in the gut just to make a point and motivate her to get over her demons. Thereby irresponsibly removing himself from the chain of command and diverting medical attention from injured civilians and soldiers who needed it more than him. And we're supposed to consider him heroic and admirable for that. Geez, and people get all worked up over the infamousFaldio debacle in the first game...

And Thus Discord: Vanquish. The ending. So, Burns dies. The HeelFace Revolving Door antics were annoying, but okay. Killed off the only memorable character, but okay! We get to the end, we get a phoned-in Token Romance. Not unusual in a game with a mostly Excuse Plot. Suddenly, Remote-controlled robot suits! Winters commits suicide! The Big Bad is winning! What climactic final confrontation will round off this epic - oh. Roll credits. What an utterly transparent Sequel Hook. I'm not falling for that ploy.

Lord Daddy Funk: Jade Empire has a pretty big one. All game other characters have reported seeing a flaw in your fighting style (the reason for this is that Master Li purposely put one in that he could exploit later on to kill you); after roughly 12 hours of gameplay, with all this build up and foreshadowing, you finally kill the Emperor who you've been lead to believe was the real villain, and how does the scene where Li betrays you pan out? With your techniques being quickly exploited in a fight and him defeating you? Nope, you get distracted by something shiny and he kills you without anything save your attention span being exploited.

Gyrobot: While the DLC for The Force Unleashed was always letting you be the bad guy, it seems that the Endor DLC proved to be a complete sacrilege to everything Star Wars stood for. You play as Starkiller as he takes out everyone in Endor in a tasteless matter that is stoking the creator's ego and the Kratos-inspired Sith sadist who indulges in the slaughter of not just Ewoks and Chewie but the entire Star Wars franchise.

Happy Man: I've never seen a single video game moment/scene that enraged me so much as the scene where the Dark Apprentice kills Chewbacca, Han, and later Leia. It's like a very, very, very, veeeeery bad fanfic brought to life. Even if it wasn't canon, seeing a God-Mode Sue (regardless of being the player) killing three beloved characters of the franchise was something beyond awful, and not fun at all.

The Dragoness: Duke Nukem Forever. Now this game was a dozen years in the making, and at best it was decent. There was a Capture the Babe mode that leaned towards Black Comedy Rape, and there was the Disappointing Last Level creeping in. However, they're not on the list. What makes this the Dethroning Moment of Suck is the Alien Hive level. Now, alien rape is something I'm fine with in the context of the story; but Duke comes across the twins he was with at the start of the game, who have been kidnapped, raped and are about to die a horrible death. For as much of a misogynist Duke is, he's always been portrayed as genuinely loving and caring of women. How does he react to their plight?

"Guess you're... fucked."

Dr Zulu 2010: While not as big as a DMOS as the last one, it's still worth to mention since it's a good example of how not to do a jab at the competition. After you clear the casino stage, the army arrives and say to Duke to wear a power armor, which he refuses to wear since it's "for pussies". Now, Duke Nukem 3D also has jab towards Doom and Quake, but they work since 3d has innovated the FPS in its own right.note It was the first game in the genre where the protagonist was more than a Heroic Mime, gave a new axis in the aiming system by aiming freely and adds more verticallity to its levels. When DNF makes this jab at Halo, it fails since Forever was riding the coattails of better games, poorly. (Which also includes Half-Life and Call of Duty) In the end, that pointless joke at Halo doesn't work and feels like the game equivalent of refering a better movie in the middle of your own; it makes me want to play those instead since they have done those mechanics much better and are more fun.

Fofa: In Heroes of Might and Magic V, it turns out Biara was disguising herself as Isabel all along. Then it's shown in the Dungeon campaign after the Dwarf missions that the real Isabel was with Raelag all this time, giving many players the impression that they were "spending quality time together". Later Word of God statements only served to send this further into WTF territory: they answered that only Raelag caught on to Biara disguising herself as the fake queen, so he went to rescue Isabel by himself and escaping from Sheog is a time consuming affair. First, this wasn't even implied at all in the cutscenes, so that could've been re-written, and second, why the hell didn't Raelag say anything?! If he had told the other heroes who were with him at the time, all those innocent people might still be alive and averted most of the damage that was done. Definitely the lowest point of the series' writing, reminding me why I rarely play the campaign modes.

Jicragg: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors: The vast majority of this game is superb, with good story, good characters, good puzzles; it was wonderful. The full/True/100% ending had one horrific reveal that ruined this almost perfect game. I am quite happy with the background of the story, that Young Akane needed to connect with future Junpei so she could save herself in the past from being burnt to death alive. What completely destroyed the entire sturdy plot was what held it all together. The reason why Young Akane ended up in the incinerator in the first place. She, "young" 'Seven' and other people, including her own brother, were escaping from the incinerator and a group of insane maniacs forcing them to do life or death puzzles. She was ahead of them on the stairs when she realised she dropped something... a doll. So she went back down to get... a doll... and got caught by the then Big Bad and forced to do the puzzle before she burnt to death. Seriously! The whole story hinged on a piece of fabric! A meaningless piece of fabric shaped to be a doll! I had absolutely no intention of saving her. All that the other characters had been through (and since you need all the endings to get this one, you see everybody die at least once) because she wanted her doll. The sad music plays over all of this and the final puzzle and you're supposed to care and feel sorry that a Too Dumb to Live girl would go back to where she's been running away from to get a doll she got from a friend when another one could be bought easily. She even says she mustn't let anybody see her get it back because they would talk her out of it. Of course they would! They're smart! Any feelings I had towards the characters (cute and likable) was replaced with utter disgust. I felt robbed and cheated. I bought this game, spent time on it, expecting something great and wonderful... and it all ended with a doll. And since the game is all about not judging things by its covers I think it worked out ironically for them. The game is great but was shattered by that... one little thing...

Capitaine Schizo: Yup, the ending was horrible on many levels. One particular problem stands out too: the heroine does her stupid move and walk back willingly in an incinerator, what the hell? Of course, she is found by the Big Bad, get trapped again, only to finally manage to tap into the morphogenetic field. Something, may I add, that brought nothing but confusion in a game whose strength was in the investigation and puzzles, not in wacky superpowers. She has five minutes to find a solution before her demise. Being in love with The Hero at this time, she creates a contact with him. The player has then to believe that the six paths he went through happened in five minutes. Five short minutes where Akane narrated absolutely everything. Needless to say, the Willing Suspension of Disbelief shattered immediately and no one could collect the pieces anymore, ruining what followed afterwards. It ties in with another problem: the awful storytelling during the Coffin Ending. So, you're here, investigating a good mystery since hours and getting closer to the truth. At this point, the player is likely to want to know what happened nine years ago. Hell, he went through a whole game (probably several times) to reach that point. And then, the game just... stops. For absolutely no reason. Apparently, Akane pushed the reset button during those five minutes just because she felt Junpei didn't have the necessary clues to keep going. Don't expect the game to tell you why.

The Dog Sage: The ending of Castle Crashers. You rescue the orange princess and she removes a veil revealing Tricky The Clown who does a dance during an Acid Trip Sequence. Now, if this was a free flash game, that'd be fine, but not for something for which I coughed up money. Honestly, I expected better than that. Doesn't stop me from playing the game, but still.

Marioking 98341: A similar mistake happens with the end of BattleBlock Theater. You beat the game, rescue Hatty, and it is revealed that Hatty is in a vegetable state. Okay, that actually works, it is actually a effective Tear Jerker. But than, the "Buckle Your Pants" song happens, and as catchy and ridiculously hilarious it is, it completely ruins the mood of what just happened. Thankfully the moment right after that was a bit of a Author's Saving Throw with the reveal of the hat growing green now, possibly giving life back to Hatty. If the 2nd and 3rd scenes were switched around, this ending would have been a LOT better. The game is still fantastic though.

Jicragg: The ending of don't take it personally babe, it just ain't your story, a good free western Visual Novel about a teacher who oversees all of the students conversations and part way through a student kills herself. He starts getting creepy messages saying "why didn't you stop her?" etc, day and night, and eventually a woman will start talking to him asking him why he didn't help her. Throughout the story there's some other drama involving a girl being a homophobic bully — the anvil is dropped onto your face that both of those are bad. Then at the end it all turns out that the students had set up a prank for the teacher to believe the girl was dead so he would lighten up and not take things so seriously... This is apparently okay! It was so... in your face that it wasn't just the darn characters! It was such a stupid prank! For starters there was a parent involved and she was fine with the possible mental and emotional scarring the man could have got from that, but no everybody was completely okay with such an outcome. It wasn't so bad that it was a free game but it felt like a waste of my time - after such lovely characters.

Catmuto: The above part mentioned was a pretty damn big moment and would have been my own, but I realized another moment that, albeit not as bad, was still bad. There is Akira and his eventual-boyfriend Nolan, who begin dating after Akira comes out of the closet. Late in the game, after the homophobic bully starts messing with their relationship out of hurt feelings (since she's Nolan's ex), Nolan becomes very protective and has one post on AmieConnect that says, "I am totaly in love with Akira. No homo." Those last two words... Those are it. That is my DMoS, the point where I could no longer believe that these guys were actually in a believable relationship. One could say he added the No Homo as a little joke, but given how his ex telling Akira that Nolan wasn't actually gay was the reason why Akira was feeling insecure and horrible, makes it come off as a very bad joke. And that coming from a supposedly loving boyfriend? And that's not even getting into Nolan's vehement mentioning that Akira is attractive, sure, but he could never actually imagine himself fucking him early on. For the homosexual couples in the game being an Author Appeal, this couple certainly seems to consist of a guy who obviously doesn't want to be in a relationship with another guy. If you want your homosexual couple to be believable, do not make even one joke about being 'No homo'.

F: I really liked God of War, but the ease in which Poseidon and Hades get killed off is seriously awful. Zeus gets a long battle culminating with being impaled repeatedly on the Blade of Olympus, leaps away essentially unharmed given an opening of about a second, one-shots Kratos when he makes it to the top of Olympus, and then needs two equally epic battles in quick succession followed by a No Holds Barred Beatdown to actually kill; and his brothers are supposed to be almost as powerful as him, which they demonstrate quite admirably against the Titans. Instead, Poseidon is apparently essentially helpless without his Leviathan and Hades can be killed by an almost totally depowered Kratos; both of which happen in the first hour or so of the game. Not only is this doing a colossal disservice to two of the greatest of the Olympians, but it also means that none of the other boss fights are ever going to compare with them in magnitude; seeing as how Helios, Hermes, and Herakles aren't even close to their league. The almost total lack of a boss fight against Helios, the bizarre absence of Artemis, and the anticlimactic ends to Hephaestus and Gaea are one thing; but this is just too far.

Kenya Starflight: I love and adore Undertale, and even like Alphys despite understanding why some players find her annoying. But her random text messages in the Hotland zone feel pretty unnecessary, adding no story or character development that isn't already given in other parts of the game and doing little more than slow down an already lengthy section of the game. And if you're the kind of person who's driven nuts by chatspeak acronyms and smileys, hoo boy...

CPF Mfan: The ending of the otherwise great expansion pack for Command & Conquer: Generals, Zero Hour. Basically, the GLA launches a counter offensive against the USA after they got the hell beaten out of them by the USA in not one, but TWO campaigns in a row. Their attack is successful beyond belief; not only do they completely obliterate US Forces in Europe and wreck the USA itself (due to the American leaders picking up the idiot ball), causing them to withdraw from all their strongholds in the world, but the GLA actually manages to launch a full scale invasion of Germany. What does NATO, the USA, and the EU do? Absolutely fucking nothing. They just sit on their hands while the dirt poor Middle Eastern / Central Asian army marches on Europe, leaving China to pick up the slack, which ends with China beating back the GLA and becoming the new world superpower. Regardless of your stance on current world politics, this ending is so improbable (requiring the US and EU to lose all semblances of competence and power, while making the Chinese a nation of Mary Sues) and unnecessary (completely negating the Moment of Awesome that was the Zero Hour US campaign) that it is ridiculous.

McJeff: Red Dead Redemption. Yeah, kill off the main character. Fine. Great artistic statement. Wow, what a great way to make me feel like I wasted the last 30 hours of my life. I don't have much tolerance for Downer Endings and Shoot the Shaggy Dog in the first place, but pulling it in a videogame, where I've actually done something as opposed to sat there and read/watched, just really fucking pissed me off.

L Dragon 2: Prototype2. Much like the ending to Mass Effect 3, the ending here makes the whole series feel rather limp. Without going in too deep, you kill Alex Mercer, the main protagonist of the series. That alone is a rather poor story choice, but what makes it worse is just how they handled his character. In the ending of the original he had saved Manhattan, truly cared for his sister, was disgusted at the depravity of Blackwatch and Gentek, and was overall starting to become more human. 2 completely does away with all this, turning him into a generic villain that is too easily defeated, all to make way for a generic character to be the hero who doesn't even care about PARIAH or any of the evils of the corporations. To put it simply, They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot.

AB Lb0y: Worst yet, the fact that when you kill Mercer, you magically shoot out a load of black tentacle thingies which somehow kill every infected person in Manhatten. Biggest. Cop-out. EVER.

Gyrobot: Spec Ops: The Line, White Phosphorous. Now I understand it was meant to mercilessly attack the player for what he usually does in UAV style missions. But not even No Russian had done something like that. Actually, now when you think about it... How would you feel if No Russian had a "Infilitration Meter" where in order to keep your cover you are forced to kill civilians rather than walk menacingly with your Light Machine Gun? That was what the White Phosphorous event felt like.

cricri3007: The revelation that Konrad was Dead All Along. Other games had a similar message as this one, criticizing the player for being violent and a "monster". But what those games had is also something that could be said to be representative of the developers, something that caused your protagonist/the player to do those things. Ryan built Rapture, The Rook Island "call the strong" and make everyone crazy over time, among others. By revealing that Konrad didn't even exist, the devs are saying everything the player did is entirely his/her fault, without any acknowledgement about their part in it.

Treb: Bully for the most part is a fantastic sandbox game. However, there is a mission in the fourth chapter that is a horrible case of Gameplay Story Segregation. Stronghold Assault. Jimmy, seeking to take down the Jocks, comes and asks Algie for assistance from the nerds in the library. Now, I spent the entire game doing all the side quests for the nerds, having 100% respect from them, and it just doesn't make any sense that they would be so hostile towards Jimmy. From a gameplay standpoint, the mission involves fighting some enemies up to the observatory, before you finally face off with Earnest (who Jimmy helps with his campaign earlier in the game) and what ensues in a repetitive, pattern based boss fight. This is a huge Out of Character Moment for the nerds who have, at this point, been built up as friendly and sympathetic characters.

matohibiki: Halo 4's ending. Reducing the final battle to what amounts to a cutscene, and a pair of one-button QTEs is just incredibly underwhelming. Not to mention the fact that the framework of the QTEs was stolen from Modern Warfare 2, and incredibly watered-down.

Mightymoose101: Dante bragging about murdering a women and her unborn child (even if said child was the son of the Big Bad and a horrible abomination itself) in Dm C Devil May Cry just to get a rise out of Mundus. The fact that Dante never even called Vergil out for this horrific act angered me enough, and I don't give a fuck if it was actually Vergil who did it, this was the Moral Event Horizon of the game which fully cemented Dante as a vile, disgusting little shithead whose sole existence pisses on the character's legacy and the entire franchise.

SenorCornholio: That moment may have been utterly terrible, but the establishing series boss fight in the demo pretty much doomed this game to failure. You know the one: Dante encounters the game's second boss, the Succubus, and the game proceeds to have Dante act like a self-entitled little shit to which the best comeback he and the Succubus can give each other is "fuck you". Not only is this Narm incarnate, it's also the direct opposite to how the old Dante would act. Pretty much everyone and their mothers have made fun of this scene in the past, to the point where "fuck you" may as well be the tagline for this game. And yet gamers are supposed to see this gameas better than the originals? Capcom, if so many people are ironically laughing at scenes from your game, maybe there's a reason it's regarded as the black sheep of the franchise.

Nikku: I could write a novel on why this game was easily one of the worst ever made, but one moment that stuck out like a sore thumb was the bit near the start where a white wig just happens to land perfectly on DINO's head. He looks at his reflection and goes "Not in a million years!" before throwing it to the floor. Alright Ninja Theory, we get it, you don't like the proper Devil May Cry games. Stop reminding us every three seconds!

Dr Zulu 2010: I'm sorry, but this version of Dante is my most hated video game character of all time. Why?! Well, look no further than the intro where we get a POV shot of Dante picking up two strippers and having a threesome with them. If it were an original character, I won't like it but I won't be this livid. Instead, Capcom and Ninja Theory took one of my favourites video game icons and turned him into a Jersey Shore reject. Thanks to this, Tameem Antoniades has reached the ranks of Randy Pitchford, Peter Molyneux, Phil Fish and Sean Murray as my most disliked game designers of all time.

Cynical Bastardo: For me, the true low point is when the Player Character finally catches up with the Jackal... and decides to side with him. True, the UFFL and the APR are complete bastards, but to renege on the game's main objective seems pointless and a huge letdown to me. Furthermore, if you take the diamonds across the border to bribe the guards to allow the civilians to escape, he expects you to shoot yourself afterwards. Why anybody would do that at the behest of a man they were sent to kill in the first place defies all logic and reason.

Killerweinerdog: Brace yourselves, ladies and gents because boy do I have a lot to say on this matter. I have been a fan of the Far Cry series since 2: It was a unique experience for me, a combination of FPS and sandbox RPG that got me hooked. And from the beginning, I was well aware of the franchise's penchant for endings that aren't all smiles and rainbows, and I went into Far Cry 5 knowing this, while still falling in love with the new mechanics: A customizable player character, new vehicles, even stepping up the flight mechanics from 4 to include actual airplanes and air combat! And that's just scratching the surface of the bits of gameplay that I loved. And, with this in mind, I really, really, really tried to love this game. But I couldn't. Why? The endings. Good God, the absolute, comprehensive and complete piles of garbage, vomit, shit and piss that was the endings. You can literally see the point where an Ubisoft exec stood up during the storyboarding and said, "you know what? I don't want a good ending on this. Make it happen, chop-chop." And then it just completely blindsides you with awkwardly shoehorned-in downer endings out of nowhere. They render everything you did All for Nothing and turn the Big Bad of the game into a massive Karma Houdini. Yeah, I get it. Happy endings are overused. But there is a BIG difference between effectively using the Bittersweet/Downer Ending tropes and a half-heated attempt at one that just takes the reward of a completed game and rips it into pieces in front of your face, and then tries to make you, the player, feel bad. How dare you go after the Big Bad's family, despite the fact that everything you did was in defense of what they were doing to you (you know, the kidnapping/torture of you and your friends, hunting you down, repeatedly trying to kill and brainwashing you)! The absolute worst part of this is, when the endings were first uncovered by players, there were theories about how it may be All Just a Dream to try and justify what they just saw, but then Ubisoft had the nerve to speak up and say, "oh no, if you were paying attention there was a radio report about a nuke going off in Moscow so the nuke ending actually happenned." Said radio report was never brought up in the story, and was simply just a 10-second sound clip you might have heard if you were lucky enough to have heard one of the dozens of random bits that play over the radio, assuming you listened to the radio at all while playing. Again, there's effective use of a trope such as Foreshadowing and then there's a half-assed attempt like this that completely misses the mark and makes a trainwreck out of the story.

Legomaniac90: Virgil's death at the hands of Marshall Burke and his subsequent suicide due to Faith Seed's Bliss powers, due to the Idiot Ball passing between nearly all involved (seriously, would it have been too hard to strap Burke down or at least disarm him?). But the kicker: Virgil is then never mentioned again, not even in passing; meaning his death was a cheap attempt at shock value meant to hammer home (for the zillionth time) how EEEEEEEEE-vil Faith Seed and her Bliss is. What a waste of a perfectly good character.

Gameite2260: XCOM: Enemy Unknown has a very horrible and cliche ending. The psionic volunteer soldier you selected makes a Heroic Sacrifice to pilot a temple ship, to stop it from destroying the earth when it blows up. But after all, this was only one ship of theirs. Maybe the aliens will finally be mad enough to raid your base just like in the original ga- Nope! The game ends right there. Not only is this an unrealistic ending to the alien attacks, but it also left a lot of plot points unanswered. What was up with the Outsiders? They're never mentioned again. And why was the XCOM government leader guy so creepy?

Sensemaker It's also ridiculously bad science, the ship suddenly starting to act like a black hole isn't even wrong; it's nonsensical. (A black hole has the same gravitational effect as any other object of the same mass unless you are very close.) The rest of the game had been "somewhat plausible-ish", but now we descend into comic book science.

nerullralishaz: An older game that always infuriated me was Shadowrun on the Sega Genesis. Without spoiling too much, you get to the final boss and fight him in a tough battle. Then at 25% health here comes an ally who you saved in a previous mission. He tells you the bad guy is too strong to defeat (despite having already knocked him down to 25% health). He then tells you how to trap the boss. Do you actually get to do so? No! Instead, it immediately goes to a (poorly animated) scene where they show you trap the boss. Game over, roll the credits. Huh? Just a little hint to a game designer: players might actually want to click a button or something to get to the ending. Not just have it handed to them out of thin air and then go to credits. Terrible ending to an otherwise entertaining game.

Tropers/sanfranman91: Even though Batman: Arkham Origins was a obvious cash-in rush job, it was not the bugs or the repetitive gameplay that convinced me to return the game to Gamestop. Rather, it was the campaign's poor decision to crank a plot twist that damaged the Arkham franchise's image. What is the twist in question, you ask? The Joker is revealed to the main villain. Not only that, he impersonated Black Mask so he can order the assassins to hunt Batman down. Look, I understand that The Joker is Batman's unquestionable Arch-Enemy. That said, this is now the third Arkham game that features the Big Bad and the way Origins introduces the Joker instantly ruined what was once an interesting plot. Adding insult to injury, when Batman meets the real Black Mask, he turns out to be a tortured, weak-hearted FlunkyBonus Boss. Given that the assassin was hyped to be a dangerous and clever adversary for Batman, this left a bad taste in my mouth. I for one would like to explore the psyche, traits, and motivations of other members of the Rogues Gallery and perhaps have them be the center of the story. It would certainly lead to more creative stories and challenges than if the player was duped into playing yet another game of stopping the same villain over and over again. In short, it's a predictable twist that wastes an infuriatingly high amount of the plot's potential.

Sam Max: While I actually enjoyed Batman: Arkham Origins for the most part, my big problem is the battle against the Electrocutioner. Granted, it wasn't too far into the game, but I expected him to put up more of a fight than "taunt you and get defeated by one hit." Now, I don't know the most about his character, but the game itself portrayed him as a deadly assassin, so I don't know why WB Games couldn't at least make him a proper boss fight.

He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Usernamed: For me it was the last boss battle, when Jim Gordon chews you out for seemingly killing Bane. Commish, Bats clearly did it in self-defense, in a situation when there was no other possible outcome, after an entire night of doing nothing but help the police, and in doing so he managed to save your life as well. What the hell are you complaining about?

Tropers/neckinhalf: Don't get me wrong here: Batman: Arkham Knight is a good game. However, one crucial thing in particular just left that bad taste in my mouth: the "end" of the Arkham Knight. The Arkham Knight has assembled a freaking militia and drone tank army to defeat Batman. He was willing to help Scarecrow coat Gotham in fear toxin. Late in the game, it's revealed that the Arkham Knight is Jason Todd, one of the former Robins. Honestly, I don't know why I'm spoiling this, as it's extremely obvious if you know a drop about Batman lore. So, how does Bats finally defeat the revenge-filled man who was willing to do all of this to get to him? Talking to him. Not a fireside chat, of course, but a bunch of "This is not you!" statements, basically. With that, the "Arkham Knight" is gone. Easily Forgiven (on both sides) doesn't even begin to cover it.

cricri300: Four words: The Joker comes back. As the person above remarked, I don't know why I'm spoiling this, considering that, by now, it should be obvious that he'll appear in everything Batman-related, but he's here again! Oh, and the game is more Batman dealing with him than with Scarecrow. The Arkham Knight is like that because of him, he appears in almost every cutscene, follows Batman around commenting everything and has more screen time than the freaking main villain! What could have been a good plot with Batman interacting with other villains get flushed down the toilet because the Joker comes back!

Truffle: I was more annoyed with the ending. In particular, how we were Left Hanging. In what seems to be a last minute Deus ex Machina, Jason arrivesjust in time to stop Scarecrow, then just as quickly disappears into the night. Shortly after this, Bruce either kills himself, or fakes his death, meaning he and Jason never truly managed to make amends. How disappointing! All that build-up and drama, which ultimately leads nowhere.

MM Trigger: The worst thing is that the intended moral is about trusting one's allies, but it's made clear that Batman's just inevitably suffer due to their own incompetence. Additionally, and most likely unintentionally, the game suggests that Batman's biggest mistake was always letting his enemies live because:

The entire series was Joker's fault; he hired the assassins, his plot in the original game was used to gain support to build Arkham City, and much of the plot in Arkham Knight ties back to his prior actions. If Batman never saved him in Batman: Arkham Origins Gotham would've been happier.

His surviving enemies collectively funded the militia.

A Gotham Story reveals that Gotham lost a class action suit against the Arkham City inmates, and a subquest about rescuing firefighters reveals that cutbacks and layoffs drove the chief to work with Firefly; saving the Arkham City inmates is what put the firefighters in danger.

Dr Zulu 2010: Related to one of the above, the sub-plot regarding the five persons infected by the Joker's blood. Remember how in Arkham City, Joker's plan is to unleash his Titan infected blood to every hospital in Gotham to poison the people via blood transfusions? The same Titan formula that slowly kills Mr.J and Batman after the former's blood is in the latter? Well, let's retcon with the four that didn't get the cure not dying or dead, but turning into Joker lookalikes. This leaves me with so many questions like: How is Joker's blood able to turn them similar like the Joker? As in getting the white skin, green hair AND the same exact personality as him? Is Joker's blood magical or something? Is this a side effect of the Titan formula that if you somehow fought the toxins that kills you it makes some sort of mutation? The latter one is hard to believe since it's foreshadowed that Batman is the fifth one who slowly turn into the Joker. It's fairly obvious that this game isn't wrote by Paul Dini, who wrote the previous games (except Origins) because he wouldn't let such a massive plot hole to happen.

Purple Shirt: The ending of Fable. No, not the XBOX game - I mean the 1996 adventure game. I mean we have a plot that is actually pretty interesting. So now Quickthrope is going to get the knowledge of the ancients... So what happens next? Oh no, the game pulls an just a dream twist and it reveals "lol it was all a book Quickthrope was reading in hell." Dude, that just came out of left field. Twists like that only work when you don't just pull it out of nowhere.

A Splashing Koi: In one of the routes in The Last Hope I Had Left (a Puella Magi Madoka Magica tie-in for the PSP), Kyouko and Madoka go to save Witch!Sayaka, like they did in the original anime. This time, though, Homura has already killed Oktavia. What does Kyouko do? She turns into a Witch. Yeah, the girl who watched her entire family die before her eyes all because of her wish despairs and turns into a Witch over someone she had known for less than a month.

Troper/Capa: I liked Dead Space 3, but the Dethroning Moment of Suck for me was when Ellie finds out that Isaac killed Norton in self-defense, even though Carver told her that he betrayed them and tried to kill Isaac, she still gets angry at him and basically accuses him of wanting to kill him all along. That makes no sense because even after he found about his betrayal, he still saved him from both Danik's men and the Nexus. If he wanted to kill him, he could just let one of the Unitologist soldiers or the Nexus kill him. This was the point that just ruined completely ruined Ellie's character for me and spoiled it.

Shadow 200: Asura's Wrath. The disk material doesn't so much as end on a sequel hook. This wouldn't be so bad if it didn't essentially mean that in order to see how the story ends, or even how an incredibly large portion of the plot unfolds, you'd have to shell out even more money for their DLC. Keep in mind, Asura's Wrath isn't a freeware game. In my eyes, it was basically the point were Capcom decided that The Almighty Dollar was more important to them than their dwindling fanbase. It's not a good business practice in the least, and if anybody else implemented it, their clients would be ticked off over it. Capcom can calmly pucker their lips and kiss my ass cause I will no longer buy anything of theirs.

philipthepatsy: Animal Crossing: New Leaf is a fantastic game. However, there's one thing that really upsets me. When you receive a request to put in a police station, you are given two options. One option will give you Copper, the other will give you Booker. In every game before this, Copper and Booker were a team. Now they have to be split up?! Why would they do that? It may not seem like that big of a deal, but it's a big slap in the face for fans of both Copper and Booker.

SenorCornholio: For me, the worst moment in this otherwise fantastic entry in the Sly Cooper franchise is the final battle against Le Paradox. The guy's been set up as a competent, if not egocentric villain who does keep letting his presence known instead of staying in the shadows, but is still supposed to be of skill equal to Sly himself. Great buildup, but piss-poor execution. Problem 1) the battle is a Cutscene Boss. You basically just press the buttons to focus on the fight. 2) The only bits of "gameplay" are chasing after the skunk. So basically, even Penelope above had an awesome boss fight that didn't involve her being cowardly and didn't incorporate this lousy cliché. 3) His motives (initially thought to be Revenge) turn out to be proving that he's the greatest thief who ever lived by stealing the Coopers' canes. Way to shoot yourself in the foot there, stinky. 4) After you defeat him, Le Paradox begs for mercy and then steals Sly's hang glider, flying off and leaving Sly's fate unknown to the general populace, and if you're really dedicated to 100%, you'll find that Sly's been stranded in Ancient Egypt! This game was otherwise amazing; in fact, I'd say it's probably my second favorite in the series after Band of Thieves. But this final boss was a disappointment due to lousy gameplay mechanics and an unsatisfying ending that left us on a Sequel Hook. Hopefully Sly 5 rectifies this if it ever comes out...

Thragg Lootrippa: Long-time fan of the Dawn of War series here. Soulstorm already has a good deal of infamy for being a barely working game released as the last gasp of a bankrupt company. That's understandable. But the one moment that breaks the willing suspension of disbelief is the Chaos hero for the campaign, Lord Firraveous Carron. Carron is a Chaos Lord, a superhuman that betrayed his makers and has been killing other superhumans and aliens, scheming to bring more death and seize more power, or fighting other renegades for anywhere up to thousands of years. Being a Chaos Lord means being tougher then all the other traitors, being evil enough to conquer galaxies for one's goals. He acts like a bloodthirsty warlord when you play campaign as Chaos, and that is to be expected. But invade his stronghold and successfully blow up his dark temples and he starts crying. A Chaos Lord that has been in the business for anywhere up to thousands of years cries over destroyed temples. Sobs. Defeat him on his territory and he flees the battle while having an emotional breakdown, only to be crushed by the opposing commander. This is the behavior of a pathetic cult leader. Are you kidding me?

Dark Super Shadow 64: Kid Icarus: Uprising is awesome, but what I didn't like is the ending. Well not the actual ending, but the implications of it. The DMOS in my eyes is that Viridi didn't learn anything. Hades, Medusa and their commanders tried to murder everyone to feast on souls and make their army dominate. They all got killed. The Aurum harvested chunks of the planet and brainwashed one of the Gods. They got killed. Chaos Kin possessed Palutena and sent Centurions to attack the land. He (or it) got killed. Viridi bombed a population of humans, and was attempting to do it more. She got off scot-free and went back to doing it more. Granted, I never liked Viridi to begin with, but could we at least see her comeuppance and gain satisfaction? She doesn't even need to die! I just want her to have a change of heart or something.

Phantom Heartless 5: I have to agree with the above. Kid Icarus: Uprising was the first game 3DS game I played for my birthday and I love it to death. And while Viridi is one of my favorite characters in the game, my only complaint was that there wasn't a boss fight with her. I mean come on! I get that she looks like a kid, but so does Pit! And she's a goddess at that! I'm pretty sure they could've squeezed a boss fight in there somewhere.

SenorCornholio: I agree with Phantom Heartless 5, big time. Viridi is also one of my favorite characters in the game; heck if it weren't for Hades, she'd be numero uno. But the lack of a boss fight was such a huge step backwards for the game that it just boggles the mind! I mean come on, she's the goddess of nature! Wouldn't a fight with her be amazing? It'd probably be on par with Hades or Palutena if it actually happened. Imagine her using her nature powers to great effect, potentially controlling the battlefield and using her powers to really give Pit a run for his money. But nope; instead the Aurum Arc below happens, then the much better Chaos Kin Arc happens, and Viridi is never fought once, nor does she ever show off her powers aside from using Reset Bombs, which were manufactured anyway so they don't even count. And if Super Smash Bros. is any indication, the closest we'll ever get to seeing what Viridi's made of is a goddamn Mii Costume. Such a huge disrespect to such a memorable character.

Calamity 2007: The entirety of The Lightning Chariot chapter, not only is it a Marathon Level with tons of pits that are hard to avoid because of the game's controls, and filled with Mimicutes but because at this point of the story Palutena is Brainwashed and Crazy you have to deal with Viridi and Hades constantly belittling and mocking Pit throughout the level to the point where it quickly stopped being funny.

n00dl3gal: Kid Icarus: Uprising is one of my favorite games of all time, and while I loathe to criticize it, I have to acknowledge that the entire arc with the Aurum was stupid as hell. First it came right the fuck out of nowhere, and then it's never mentioned again. Not even Pyrrhon makes an appearance again. What a waste of three chapters.

tvlegend: Even though I love this game to death, there is one chapter I simply cannot stand in the slightest. The chapter in question is chapter 24. For starters, there's the fact that this chapter doesn't even have its own music. It just reuses music from previous chapters in the game. How lazy can you get!? Secondly, there's the premise: Dyntos gives you 3 trials, and the first one is to defeat 3 bosses that you fought previously in the game. Normally, I'm OK with bosses being reused as long the bosses I fought before were good. Only 2 of the 3 bosses were good (those being the Phoenix and Cragalanche). However, each boss is bridged by places where you had to face some of the toughest enemies in the game. Usually, when I play this level, I get beaten to a pulp by those god damn Mimicuties that you face before Cragalanche! It doesn't help that immediately after them, you fight a Reaper with lots of health. If I survive that and defeat Cragalanche, I usally get finished by the extremely powerful enemies before I fight the Kraken. What follows after the Kraken? A fight against Magnus and Dark Lord Gaol. I'm sorry, but what? Why Magnus? He's one of the good guys! Why not Dark Pit? Wouldn't he be a great character to bring back to fight once more before the end of the game? Instead you give us a fight against a fake Palutena who I only remember because she kept screaming "Feel the Shame!" over and over again! (Might as well have her scream "You'll pay for your insolence!" or "Get up on the Hydra's back!" or the classic "Burn to the Ground!") After that annoyance, we finally get to face the Great Sacred Treasure which, I admit, is an OK boss, but far from enough to redeem this awful chapter. Even the dialogue, which is usually a saving grace in this game, is flat and dull. Thank God for the amazing final chapter that came after this awful one!

Slimbship4: Ambition by Zap Dramatic is full of So Bad, It's Good moments, but the third episode made me outraged to no end. The player is in charge of conducting a psychological exam on Ted Hartrup who spent the previous two episodes as a suicide bomber, threatening to "blow us all to hell". As suicide bombing is considered an act of terrorism, you'd expect to win by declaring him psychotic. But that's not the case. You win by declaring him sane despite the aforementioned suicide bombing and his claim that God is talking back at him. The game even says that he should not be held criminally responsible just because he had an amoral wife who didn't do much by that point. That completely cemented him as a Creator's Pet for the author, Michael Gibson, and a representation of his religious and social views. It's even more rage-inducing when you consider that Gibson intended for his games to be realistic. If they actually were, then Ted would actually be held criminally responsible if he was declared to be sane. What a total waste of $5 a month!

MysticEclectic: Episode 3's a taste of what's to come compared to the utter chaos of Episode 10, a four-part "Grand""Finale". Spoilers are unmarked, but the moments of suck here are quite volumnious.

Afterwards, in going home, an escaped Ted is found in the Parking Garage, who protects you from unknown assailants in a van who shoot and kill two unidentified women behind you, as well as rig your car to explode. The police are called to investigate, but dismiss the murder scene as oil splotches!

If you've seen the whole story, then this is your payoff: being smothered by a profoundly wretched cast of characters insulting your intelligence because of Michael Gibson's envy. Ambition was always polarizing, but never thisincompetent.

WRM 5: For me, it was "Episode 9: The Marriage Counselor", aka "Episode 9: Yale's Character Derailment". Yale wasn't perfect, granted. He was cheating on his wife with a colleague, yeah, but he broke it off because he legitimately realized it was wrong, and he was presented as being basically a decent person and a good lawyer who honestly cares about his clients. Then... Episode 9 hits, and your detective character is tasked with posing as a marriage counselor for him and his wife, Helen. The entire episode is basically one huge character assassination for Yale, and as soon as the episode is over all of this is immediately forgotten. A few of his bigger offenses in the episode include:

He acts like a total misogynist. He's constantly talking over his wife, while both implicitly and explicitly calling her stupid, seemingly just because she's a woman. He even explicitly says at one point that sex is the single most important part of a relationship, right before saying that having sex three times a week is "hardly ever."

He comes across as completely money-hungry, even accidentally saying "I love you, money" when trying to say "I love you, honey." He also ends up just buying his wife off with a crudely drawn diamond necklace.

Possibly the biggest (and strangest) offenses: he makes a reference to the enslavement of Africans, which wouldn't be that big a deal except that he ends up portraying the slavers in a positive light as he compares his own business practices to theirs. This is especially weird considering he is actually African-American himself.

Crashnburner 187: I like Grand Theft Auto V, but the scene where Trevor kills Johnny Klebitz really rubbed me the wrong way. I understand that the writers needed to show that Trevor was an unhinged homicidal maniac, but having him kill the main character from a previous game in the series only just cemented my dislike for this character. Especially so, since Johnny was a much more likable protagonist than Trevor is. It just seems like a bad Revenge Fic was picked up by Rockstar and made canon.

Vexer: That annoyed me too, though I just handwaved Johnny's death as being one of Trevor's drug-induced hallucinations like his mother. Unfortunately I couldn't really do that with the moment that annoyed me the most, specifically in the mission "Legal Troubles" where pretty much every character holds on to the Idiot Ball for dear life for completely nonsensical reasons. Basically Devin's secretary Molly wants to confiscate and destroy the physical copy of movie producer Solomon Richards finished film, Michael(thinking it's the only copy of the film) doesn't want that to happen so he goes after her, which results in a long car chase that ends with Molly getting killed by an air turbine, the stupid part comes when Solomon reveals that the physical copy of the film was not the only one(which most people playing the game had already guessed at that point) and there were digital backups, Solomon then says he thought Michael knew, despite Michael's actions clearly indicating otherwise. Solomon was stupid for not telling Michael before he went after Molly, Michael and Molly were both stupid for assuming the physical copy was the only one. The whole mission was basically one gigantic case of Poor Communication Kills that never should've happened, even with how over-the-top GTA is, there isn't enough Willing Suspension of Disbelief in the entire universe for me to believe that all of those characters could act this stupid in ways that defy any kind of logic, thus making the whole mission feel like a completely pointless Idiot Plot which killed off a potentially interesting character in one of the dumbest and most-contrived ways i've ever seen in any medium.

Chimanruler 15: The mission Roman's Sorrow in Grand Theft Auto IV. After Dmitri destroys Roman's business and apartment, Roman and Niko begin to find a new place to live. During the trip, Roman chews Niko out for causing all of this to happen. Roman has a right to be angry, but the problem here is that while Niko did make some stupid decisions that led to this event, (a) he was trying to help, and (b) none of this would have happened if Roman hadn't landed himself in hot water in the first place due to his stupid gambling problem (and unfortunately, Niko doesn't think to bring this up). It wouldn't have been as bad if Roman only got angry at Niko for the fires, but no, he blames him for everything bad that has happened in his life and takes absolutely no responsibility for any of it.

Lobos 1943: As an Italian-American, I hated how in Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned and Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony Luis Lopez and Johnny Klebitz were always using ethnic slurs, especially against Italians. Luis never shuts up about how much he hates Italians and constantly calls them "dagoes" and "guineas". He seems to think that all Italians are mobsters, which irritates me. Its made even worse by the fact that Luis is such a wooden character. Then there's Johnny Klebitz, who says "All you guineas are two-faced pricks!" What is even worse is that he says this after conspiring to steal from them. As someone of Italian descent, I had to put down the controller because I was so angry and offended that I couldn't see straight. I am not trying to say that the mafia are good, but the only reason they even go after Johnny and his biker gang in the first place is because they stole from them. What were they expecting the mafia to just throw up their hands and give up?

InTheGallbladder: I've played games that depressed me, games that disappointed me, and games that left me utterly infuriated. However, not once have I ever played a game that's left me feeling as though I was totally stolen from. That is, until Dark Matter, which ends all of a sudden on a white-on-black Wall of Text (sans BGM) which doesn't resolve or explain jack shit beyond the fact that the game has just ended, although it also gives you the friendly reminder that you can explore a bit if you want. I should note that this game was billed as being complete and sold for $15 USD on the market.

SomeNewGuy: The ending to BlazBlue: Chrono Phantasma is easily the single most horrific instance of a Sudden Downer Ending I have ever seen in a video game. In the course of only a few minutes, the heroes lose everything, all their victories are rendered pointless (Oh, Terumi's dead and Relius is left powerless? Here, have a villain that was never mentioned or foreshadowed who pulls story breaking powers out of her ass in order to destroy everything we've worked for for 3 games), all of the heroes are either dead (Platinum), Face Heel Turned (Nu, Ragna), beaten to the point they can't do anything to stop Izanagi (Noel, Jin), utterly broken by everything they've gone through (Bang, Litchi, Carl), utterly powerless to do anything to save the world (Rachel, Valkenhyn, Hakuman), or so consumed by their desire for revenge they're no better than the actual villains. (Kokonoe, Tsubaki). It is fairly safe to say that nothing was accomplished except giving the Big Bad exactly what she wanted.

Heartlesswithaheart: I felt it hit sooner than that, namely when everyone but Kokonoe decides to avoid sacrificing Celica (a character I already hate) in favour of... thinking of something else. Normally, this would just be a generic (and out of place for the series) shounen anime moment, but if they waited any longer, the world would be doomed and everyone would die. Obviously, that would include Celica, who everyone is trying to save. Not that it would matter much anyway, since she's a clone that would die in six months regardless of what happened, and Celica herself was fully for the idea of Kokonoe's plan. Then Rachel shows up and reveals that nobody needs to sacrifice themselves because of a reason that was not only vaguely foreshadowed, but would make more sense if it were revealed as something else. It felt very out of place for the series, felt like an Ass Pull, and existed to make Kokonoe seem like the villain for suggesting the choice that leads to the best outcome and getting annoyed with the "heroes" for suggesting what could be the worst possible choice aside from not doing anything.

Cerotech Omega: As much as I like the BlazBlue series, one of my biggest complaints is that the series is about the Azure, its champions, and its corrupters as a whole, not "The Trials, Tribulations and Endless Suffering of Ragna the Bloodedge" — emphasis on "Endless Suffering". While it started turning towards this particular tale during Chronophantasma, there's one particular moment in Central Fiction that, in hindsight, makes the entire issue supercritical from day one. That moment is where Ragna submits to becoming the world's enemy. Normally, I get depressed when a hero loses all hope in their own cause, like when Ragna admitted in CP that his destiny had already been decided for him to begin with (three games too late for that warning, Rachel), and look forward to when they bounce back, even if they never do, but it's the implications behind the story's existence in the first place that take the whole scene from distressing to disgusting. The entire story reads out like Amaterasu's badly-written cry for help from her younger 'brother' Susano'o, better known as Yuuki Terumi, who was revealed to be the cause behind the entire godforsaken plot and someone I shall henceforth call DS for "Discount Satan", because that's all he really is. Basically, DS manifests in the Susano'o unit after Amaterasu had been undergoing an existential crisis and, instead of thinking "this girl's whining is getting on my nerves; better find out what's wrong and fix it so she can shut up for once in an aeon, but in a way I can benefit from in the long run", decides that she doesn't deserve the power she possesses and decides to destroy it all out of raw spite and rewrite it in his own twisted image, which he sets about doing by abandoning the Susano'o unit and manipulating world affairs. So what does she do, especially with her chosen hero? Does she descend incognito and fight DS, or guide anyone who can fight him into doing so? She doesn't. Is her plan "empower the hero to figure out what's going on and put a stop to him"? No! Did she entertain using her godly powers to manipulate affairs behind the scenes with DS' schemes in mind, moving every pawn on the field into his inevitable checkmate? Oh, I remember now! She orchestrates affairs so she can project the symptoms of her abuse onto her capital-T The Chosen One, having his mentor figures literally beat every third option and semblance of free will out of him — something DS is more than glad to do on his own — and reset affairs if Ragna takes the realistic outcome and decides "Forget my life", "Count me out", or "Screw the entire planet"! All of this amounts to literally making Ragna's fate as her "stress outlet" so concrete that he cannot even die of his own accord! Toshimichi Mori, am I remembering your story correctly?! Amaterasu literally empowers the abuse of Ragna the Bloodedge to forget the abuse she and her manifestation are already experiencing courtesy of DS, which takes victim blaming and Stockholm Syndrome to their utmost repulsive conclusions, and that Ragna's entire story amounts to being the Cosmic Plaything until he agrees to be a pawn of fate, to which his only reward is the right to erase himself from existence, is an affront to BlazBlue, common sense, and writing in general, especially since "rebellion against fate" was a major running theme for the series in the first place. The worst part of all this, and why it's my dethroning moment, is that up until these implications registered to me, Ragna was my second favorite character in the series, behind Makoto, only being held back from a narrower margin by how badly the universe has it in for him and how it never lets him do anything that isn't part of the game of destiny... one which I learned is far too childish to be a suitable conflict between gods. I originally wanted Makoto's "death" in the story to be my dethroner due to how it perfectly embodies the story's treatment of the secondary cast, but that only applies to CF, whereas what happened to Ragna retroactively afflicts the entire series with terminal cancer and refuses to give it appropriate medical care. The disgusting implications of this entire plot paint every member of the core cast, save Jin, Tsubaki and possibly Makoto herself, in the most repulsive light imaginable, and have offended me to the point that I refuse to watch actual gameplay pan out and see the finer details anymore. Amaterasu, you finally got your broken shell of a man for all eternity, and this is the hero you deserve. I hope you're proud of yourself. Anyone who has stayed on for the plot, you are free to your interpretations, but at least try to entertain that my criticism is my own view of how things turned out. And Toshimichi Mori, to you and your writing team who made this entire debacle happen: inhale my fucking dong.

Fofa: Soul Calibur V, I have a problem with your writing. Pyrrha and Patroklos are the Spotlight-Stealing Squad and none of the other characters get any real story time. The Replacement Scrappy levels are too high, and the games' story could have just ended at IV. But I draw the line at how you wrote out my favourite character, Cassandra. Bascially, She was shocked into a one-blow submission from Sophitia's forced FaceHeel Turn and somehow ended up in an alternate dimension, unable to return. Come on Namco, Cassandra was more badass than that! I'm calling Fanon Discontinuity on this one.

Storm Kensho: What really teed me off about SC5 was the developer justification for why Taki (longtime series Ensemble Dark Horse) had retired from her mission of hunting the evil of Soul Edge: Apparently, Taki being 46 years-old meant she was too old to be a ninja and, like a proper woman, retired and trained a successor. Talk about massive Values Dissonance! For one, anyone, especially a woman (who generally age a good bit slower than men, especially if they don't put their bodies through the stress of pregnancy and childbirth) will be more than capable of performing physical acrobatics and possess above-average flexibility into their fifties if they're vigorous enough with training and keeping themselves in shape, which Taki undoubtedly would due to being, y'know, Taki. Secondly, Mitsurugi is the exact same age as Taki in SC5 and is just as skilled and as capable as he was 17 years prior despite being in a similarly-harrowing profession.

WRM 5: I agree with Animeking 1108, but I'd like to expand on it a bit. See, the bit that immediately precedes that moment is actually fine. Patroklos arrives in a town torn apart by war and is beset by three people who are fighting to end the bloodshed. He decides that they must be malfested and kills them. That's a great sequence and perfectly establishes what I think they wanted to say about Patroklos: he killed three people who weren't actually evil, yeah, but it was understandable: he was being misled and they did attack him first. If THAT had been Patroklos' Establishing Character Moment it would have been tremendously effective. Unfortunately, as has been mentioned, that wasn't the end of the scene because immediately after that Patroklos stops a homeless man on the street and declares him malfested because he's pale and filthy. First off, what? I thought the point of the preceding scene was that Patroklos doesn't actually know what a malfested is. The three guys he killed weren't pale or filthy. If being pale and filthy is a factor in determining who is malfested than that means he knew those three guys earlier weren't malfested and killed them for no reason. More than that, the smug expression and "pity there's no way to prove it" line is what really drives the point home: Patroklos knew full well that this guy was almost certainly not a malfested and he didn't care. He's not a champion of justice who's being misled by the villain, he's just a murderous bigot who enjoys killing people for little to no reason. So why is he the hero again?

Loekman 3: What made me truly hate him is when he sees Phyrra becoming the host of Soul Edge. So does he try to help his "little" sister to break free from the sword's control as his goal in the entire story, does he attempt to remind her of who she is or try ask for help to help free his sister? No!!! Instead, he just runs away from her immediately after seeing her in that state and when he met her again, he kills her without any remorse or pity, as he sees her as just another malfested for him to kill. And he would have done it too if it weren't for the Ass Pull time travel from the Edge Master. This is the real moment to me that cements Patroklos as one of the most triumphant example of Designated Hero in the history of video games.

ilovedededeAGAIN: I love Super Mario Sunshine, being one of my favorite Mario games, but the one scene I never liked was when Mario was on trial. There are so many things wrong with this scene. 1. A normal trial in Real Life would last a few hours to even a day. This one lasted only a good two minutes before Mario was deemed guilty. 2. What absolutely pissed me off the most was that the judge and the jury simply deemed Mario guilty: that part in particular left an absolute bitter taste in my mouth because the court had no evidence that Mario was the culprit, they deemed him guilty simply because they thought he was the criminal. They didn't even give him an attorney and there we're no witnesses called either, so this is a fail (even Chuggaaconroy pointed this out). To make it even worse, Mario wasn't even the criminal in the first place: it was a clone of him called "Shadow Mario" who is actually Bowser Jr. in disguise, and if you see him throughout the game, he has a light-blueish color to him - not like Mario. Are the judges idiots or what? Finally, they even didn't give Peach and Toadsworth to object (granted, they did try to object, but the judge automatically ruled it down before they could even say anything aside from "Objection!"), which just flat-out made me pissed because Peach is royalty - the judges should not be able to rule her down. And in the end, Mario is wrongly deemed guilty, gets put in the Delfino Plaza prison for the rest of that day, and is forced to clean up the entirety of Isle Delfino - while on a freaking vacation! And to make it more cheesy, the police said told Mario not to slack off as they'd be watching him. I've "slacked off" so many times in the game, even right in their freaking sight, and they don't even give a crap. As if they forgot that they we're supposed to be watching Mario! Poor Mario was nothing but a Butt-Monkeywoobie in that scene! What?!

Ninetails 2000: Agreed! The worst part of this is that the court mentions that the graffiti was part of a crime spree that's been going on for months. Mario arrived that day and before he even left the airstrip (after the plane he was on nearly crashed, no less), he had already set to work cleaning graffiti that was already there! And if you walk around and talk to the NPC's about it, they all immediately blame Mario for the problems. This becomes especially stupid given that Shadow Mario has (intentionally) made himself visible enough during his crimes for people to recognize him on sight. There's even an artist sketch that clearly shows that whomever it is is a solid blue individual with red eyes. Also, as the previous poster pointed out, where do they get off dismissing royalty like that? If a friggen' princess is coming to the defense of Mario, then maybe you should hear her out! F.L.U.D.D. even lampshades this during his talk with Mario by pointing out that the real criminal is still running rampant while they're busy throwing Mario under the bus.

Ecclytennysmithylove: Thirded. I expected some Character Development from the judge, the jury, and the Isle Delfino residents (i.e. they feel remorse for what they done after being informed that Bowser Jr. was the imposter, and then apologize to Mario for the misunderstanding). But no, in the end they just cheered for Mario for defeating Bowser and Bowser Jr.. Some friendly citizens they are!

Chimanruler 15: Fifthed. What makes all of this even worse is that the Piantas don't bother establishing a motive for Mario's supposed crimes. Do they even know how the legal system works? Mario was fighting a monster at the airport, something that the Piantas would have discovered if they had simply bothered to hear Mario, his companions, or any staff at the airstrip out. If Mario was doing something good for the town, then what reason would he have to vandalize everything? Oh, and the Piantas don't do anything while Mario is clearly chasing around the real culprit who captured Peach. I wonder how this town is able to function.

Case: A mainline Mario game starts with a lengthy unskippable cutscene. Hey, kids, want to play some Mario? All right, just wait a few minutes while we (fail to) explain why he has to collect the shines! That the cutscene looks and sounds downright incomplete at parts, and, well, everything written above, just makes an already bad problem worse.

Mineboot45: Damn straight. I think Chuggaaconroy put it best: "This is more rigged than Saddam Hussein's trial!"Full Quote "Wait a minute! Hold on. Wait a minute. So there was no statement by the defense, no attorney appointed to the defense, no witnesses called, no evidence presented, nobody even bothered to notice that we literally got here four minutes and thirty-four seconds before we were arrested, and there wasn't even a jury? This is more rigged than Saddam Hussein's trial!"

Falcon Pain: In addition to the above observation, it raises an additional bit of Fridge Horror. So Mario and Yoshi defeat young Bowser and save the stork and Luigi, and then Kamek's back to kidnap them again and bring them to a new set of Bowser's castles before the night's over? As much mileage as the series gets out of the idea that Bowser kidnaps Peach "every other week", the rebound time has never been so low that you have to wonder if the period of freedom is less than the period of captivity, or if it's even possible to call it "defeating" Bowser. Also, the stork was so far off that he had to cross an ocean (complete with island of Yoshis) on the way between the wrong home and the right one? At this point, the Here We Go Again! factor is so confusing and unrewarding that it would have made more sense to just make the game a remake of the first one with new levels and bosses.

Gunarm Dyne: I gave Yoshi's New Island the benefit of the doubt for the most part. I forgave the idiot retcon to the original game's ending. I forgave the butt kazoo title theme. I even forgave Bowser's Giant Space Flea from Nowhere appearance. What I could not forgive was the absolutely pitiful attempt at a climactic final boss with nothing that sounded like a final battle theme. It's hard to put into words but, suffice it to say, it completely ruined what was otherwise a decent boss battle. The original game's final battle was epic enough on its own but made legendary by its hard rock theme. The pathetic final fights in this game were simply the final nail in the coffin that destroyed everything that made the original game great.

KingBowser9001: You know, the entire game could technically be considered a DMoS for the entire series, but since I can't list the whole game, I'll second this. Taking this up a notch, the entire climax felt like a slap in the face to me. First off, remember the long and epic final dungeons in the past 3 games? Yeah, now how about a bunch of empty hallways with 2 frustrating boss fights? On the topic of those boss fights, take a look at our final bout with Kamek. He turns your stickers into flip-flops and summons clones. It gets worse because Kamek also exploits one of the biggest problems with the battle system: The inability to skip your turn. This turns him into a flat-out Goddamned Boss. And now, the dethroning moment of the dethroning moment- The Final Boss. Lackluster portrayal aside, Bowser has a heavily flawed boss fight. Not only does he have 400 health points, but somebody at Intelligent Systems thought it would be a good idea to make Bowser a Sequential Boss and give him 5 Thing weaknesses! Even worse, unlike previous bosses, he's borderline Unwinnable by Design without them! The last phase had the potential to be an awesome and actually Nintendo Hard boss fight, but unlike the rest, it goes down in about 2 minutes without much effort after Kersti's sacrifice. Even more insulting to the big guy, it's possible to defeat him without Kersti, turning that into a Stupid Sacrifice. It's still goddamn easy! And then the ending, which, no thanks to the biggest Ass Pull I've ever seen in a Mario game, makes Kersti's sacrifice mean nothing! Thank God for Color Splash, which did all of this crap better.

Julayla: I would like to bring in one game no one expects, which I believe has a moment that sucks: Conker's Bad Fur Day. I enjoyed the game very much. Heck, I like to play it again or watch playthroughs of it. However, there is one thing I find that sucks: Conker's Idiot Ball when it came to Berri's resurrection. It happened when the game froze and Conker was talking with one of the programmers. With the help of the programmer, he should have been able to resurrect his girlfriend while getting some weapons and arriving to the throne room to finish off Heinrich. But no, it was not to be. When I played the game, I was like, "Did he actually forget about Berri?" Well, yes he did. Because after the final boss is killed by Kitana, when the people he dislikes begin appearing, Conker finally realizes that he forgot to bring back Berri and tries (and fails) futilely to get the programmer back, thus the Downer Ending we get. All I can say afterwards is, "What an Idiot! indeed."

Xiristatos: In light of the DMOS of my fellow troper above, I would like to bring up the very moment that gave us that scene in the first place: Berri's death itself. In the game's final level, Conker and Berri are sent by Don Weaso, the Weasel Mafia boss, on a mission to rob a bank. Eventually however they meet the Panther King, where it turns out that this was just a trap set up to lure Conker. The Panther King then orders Don Weaso to kill Berri, and the Dethroning Moment of Suck begins from this point forward. First of all, Berri just stands there and takes the bullets... and I don't even mean any shocked reaction or the like, she just stands there without reacting in any way, even though it's very clear she's about to be shot to death (this is so mind numbingly stupid that it may be the reason why in the remake, she instead gives something of a "Come at me, bro!" kind of reaction, probably in an attempt to "fix" her literally standing there). This is made even worse by the fact that just before that cutscene she spent the whole level with Conker dodging bullets Matrix-style, so what happened here? And on that note, where the hell is Don Weaso after all this? The very last thing we see of him is him leaving behind the Panther King's throne in shock after Heinrich, the Final Boss, appears out of the King's chest. We don't even see him getting sucked out of the airlock into space like everyone else in the room (including even Professor von Kriplespac, The Man Behind the Man) except for Conker and Heinrich, that is really the last we see of him. It's probable that he shared the same fate as everyone else, but because it wasn't visibly seen and he left the scene before the Professor launched everyone into space, I will have to interpret this as a Karma Houdini moment on his part, especially considering that he was the main reason this whole event happened in the first place, killing the one and only person Conker genuinely loved. To top it all off, this idiocy wasn't even necessary. They could have easily had Heinrich be the one that kills Berri immediately after entering the scene, which not only would have made the boss battle that follows with him much more satisfying, it would have made a lot more sense than Berri just... doing nothing and getting herself shot. All in all, they blew every opportunity to avoid a major What an Idiot! moment... atleast before the other inevitable What an Idiot! moment mentioned above me. On the bright side, it did give us Don Weaso's extremely hammy delivery of "Adios!".

Lil Maibe: I love Etrian Odyssey 4 to bits. So naturally I was looking forward to the European release of Etrian Odyssey Untold. And oh boy, was I disappointed. I wouldn't have expected a game that plotholeriddled after the excellence of the fourth one. But the bit that takes the cake, the point where even without thinking about the plot as such I stared at my 3DS half-blankly, half-ready to throw it came in the Story-Mode when you confront Visil in the 5th Stratum. How exactly can Visil, the father of Yggdrasil NOT know about the site the main character was summoned to investigate? This was the final straw for me because there's already been not a single element to the story in the new story-mode that would not have been there purely because the plot demands it, but too much is just too much.

Enigma Lobo: My opinion on Telltale's The Walking Dead and it's writing had declined since the second half of Season 2, mainly due to my issue with how certain characters were treated that just didn't sit right with me, along with the drop in quality in terms of story telling. Sarah's death in Season 2 felt both mean-spirited and spiteful towards a child who was confirmed by Telltale to have PTSD (as well as shown to have signs of anxiety and panic disorders), and the vitriolic response from the writers regarding about their distaste towards Sarah made them appear highly immature and unprofessional towards people of disability. The overall quality with A New Frontier was also a massive let-down that felt very disconnected to the previous seasons, mainly due to the story focusing on the dreaded family drama and love-triangle within the Garcia family instead of Clementine, along with the sudden deaths of Kenny and Jane, or the abrupt downfall of Wellington that negated the entire point of Season 2. The final nail in the coffin for me was the second episode of The Final Season, featuring the return of Lilly, who I felt that underwent a Character Derailment so ridiculous and jarring they don't seem like the same person at all. We had a well-written character from Season 1 who was portrayed as a morally-complex and well-intentioned character who was pushed into villainy due to the trauma and injustice they had endured. Upon returning into The Final Season? Lilly has been inexplicably reduced into a remorseless child kidnapper, child torturer, child soldier engineer, and child murderer, purely to create a villain for The Final Season. After finding myself disliking Kenny and Jane in Season 2, I found myself appreciating Lilly in turn back in Season 1, and seeing them return in Season 4 as a horrific and irredeemable monster was the last straw for me.

Pigeons: This! This was by far the worst moment of the entire (otherwise brilliant) series for me. It was so disgusting. The actual death itself I can handle - if the aftermath had been written well, in fact, it would have been the most effective player punch I'd ever seen. But... Sarah was a 15-year-old girl, possibly somehow disabled, who had gone through more than anyone in the group with what happened to her dad from episode 2 onwards and how much she'd had to cope with. My Clem was really close with her and protective of her, and watching her get eaten alive by walkers while screaming for help, and for her dead dad tore me apart, and then... Nothing. We're just supposed to enjoy the 'heartwarming' scene immediately afterwards. Sure, we got to tell Jane off briefly... But when she leaves the group soon after, because boo hoo, she's the only one affected by Sarah's death, and only for her own selfish reasons, we're supposed to be torn up about it. No way. I wanted to grab Jane and throw her down to the walkers, not be forced to feel sympathy with her. Every death afterwards left a bad taste in my mouth, and I couldn't get into the sadness of it. Sure, episode 5 was heartbreaking, but whenever someone died, I was sitting there grinding my teeth, because I kept thinking "oh sure, we'll be sad for Rebecca/Luke/whoever. Sarah mattered much more to me, so can we please stop mourning these people when the sweetest and most innocent character in the season (who's been with us since episode 1!) apparently didn't matter whatsoever?" Absolutely disgusting. As much as I love these games, I'm never getting over how awful that was.

Noa JM: A moment in the otherwise stellar Episode 5 of Season 2 stands out with myself. Firstly, Mike, Bonnie and if you're nice to him, Arvo. You're forced into a railroaded plot where no matter how nice you treat Arvo or how much you agree with Bonnie and Mike you're gonna get shot by Arvo and have to go with Jane and Kenny. Bonnie's attitude towards Clementine also forces her into Jerkass territory if you cover Luke instead of saving him, as she decides to blame her for Luke being dead and is willing to leave Clementine behind to bleed out from her gunshot wound. Mike is a painful example of Lima syndrome, as he disregards all sense of logic and is constantly sympathetic to Arvo (which, to be honest, can make sense if you robbed him). But still, taking the truck and all of the supplies knowing that there's an 11 year old girl and a newborn baby that needs it? Ultimate dick move, you three. And due to the story's penchant for open ended interpretation of characters that disappear offscreen, one possibility is that they Karma Houdini'd their way out of the situation.

Truffle: What annoys me is how much time and effort I put into bonding with the characters only to end up watching them die. The game constantly gives you the illusion of choice, except it's less of a choice, and more a case of delaying the inevitable. Saving someone in one chapter will only cause their death in another. If Walter saves Nick in chapter two, he'll die later in chapter four. If you convince Sarah to leave the trailer with you, she'll die later at the observation deck. And regardless of whether you run to help Luke, or choose to stay and cover him, he dies anyway. It really makes the game slip into Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy, and the only characters who impact the plot are Jane and Kenny, making everyone else expendable.

Capn MP: As awfully handled as that potential death scene for Sarah was, especially considering that "leave Sarah behind" death in the trailer is handled *infinitely better*, I could tolerate it. What made me question even bothering with the rest of the series was a part in the first episode of Season 3/A New Frontier/callitwhatyouwill. It's revealed that Clementine is alone because Kenny, and presumably AJ, just died in between seasons. At least as far as this episode goes, Kenny's death is the only one seen, and even then only through a flashback sequence. Now yes, it's true that important and beloved characters die all the time in this show, hell, look at the end of Season 1. But the difference between that and this is that, while Lee died saving Clem, and his served an important purpose as setting the groundwork for Season 2's Start of Darkness, Kenny dies because of a car crash. That's it. Sure, he gets the walkers away from Clememtine and AJ before they eat him, but that doesn't change the fact that his death was completely unnecessary. We, the player, spent all of season 1 becoming Fire-Forged Friends with him as Lee, and 4/5ths of season 2 becoming like a daughter to him as Clementine, and they want to give him such a lame, unnecessary death as this? Fuck. You. This is as bad as that Alien movie where it's revealed at the very beginning that Newt just died in a fuckup with the cryotube. They just killed off an important character who deserved so much more. They can kill Kenny all they want to, but for Christ's sake, don't do it at the very start of the season in an incredibly unsatisfying way. Honestly, who *didn't* want Kenny to be present for the events of season 3, even if he dies later? Waaait a minute. I think I just figured out why Kenny died so quickly and so unimportantly. Remember the end of Season 2, where you had a choice between him and Jane? Both of them are very different characters and having Kenny/Jane around for a significant length of time in Season 3 would make the story actually diverge based on who you picked, and then Telltale Games wouldn't be able to railroad us up the ass like they always have done with The Walking Dead. I never played the Jane ending but $5 says the scene would've gone exactly the same with a different character in place. Seriously, back in the era of Season 1 the railroading was fine, because Telltale Games was a smaller, not so well known company, and it would've taken a lot of effort to make it seriously diverge. And even back then, sure it was the same story, but it was at least a *good* story. But just throwing away this awesome character for the sake of being too lazy to make the plot different with two different characters, is unforgivable.

Maths Angelic Version: I love Professor Layton. Well, at least I did before the ending of Professor Layton and the Unwound Future made me swear off the series. It's revealed that Celeste is actually Layton's girlfriend. It was thought that she died when a time machine exploded ten years ago, but for reasons that don't make sensenote "the time machine can't keep her in the present". You know, that time machine exploded, so how does that even work?! If she was in the machine when it exploded, she should just have died right then. If she was already in the future when the machine exploded, it would make more sense for her to be simply stuck in the future instead of this "the broken machine is somehow actively keeping her in the future and conveniently works until the end of the game, but that's it" nonsense., she was sent ten years into the future and is doomed to die soon. Claire won't even let Dimitri continue his attempt to save her because she thinks tampering with time is too dangerousnote Why does she assume that? The explosion happened because of a miscalculation., so she says goodbye to Layton and goes back to get killed in the explosion. Then there's a Narmy scene that shoehorns in Snow Means Death even though the weather conditions imply summertime. What a stupid ending that only serves to give the player, and poor Layton, a slap in the face. Couldn't they just have let him live Happily Ever After with Claire after all he's been throughnote If Claire would get in the way for new plots after these events, just put her on a bus or something., or at least have refrained from throwing this cruel Hope Spot at him? The fact that time travel is actually possible also reeks of They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot, which is particularly jarring because the game has already wasted an interesting Bad Future plot. Oh, and just to rub salt in the wound, Luke moves away from Layton. Also, the bastard who's directly responsible for Claire's death and indirectly responsible for the main plot gets away with it. It genuinely looks like the writers wanted to make the ending as cruel and unsatisfying as possible without having Layton fail to solve the mystery at all — logic be damned. What a terrible payoff for following the trilogy of DS games to the end. After the first two games, I believed that Level-5 would write a satisfying conclusion that didn't rely on cheap tragedy via Ass Pulls and Shocking Swerves.

The Meteor King: One thing I absolutely despise about Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask is how at the ending it's revealed The Masked Gentleman is a pissed off Randall Ascot who hates how everyone moved on with their lives after he died. It has to be the weakest villain motive I've ever seen for someone who's been assumed dead for years would be so pissed off that his girlfriend moved on and married someone else, or that his family's fortune went to someone else. How spoiled and whiny can you possibly be to cause so much damage over that? Worse still is how in the end he's forgiven and it's revealed that the people he was mad at actually were just holding out for him being alive, despite having no obligation to believe he was. The ending just left a sour taste in my mouth altogether.

Melancholy Utopia: I immensely love the series; never has puzzle-solving been so much fun. But I cannot simply ignore how utterly stupid the reveal was in Professor Layton and the Azran Legacy with Layton holding the Idiot Ball, and it will never cease to piss me off. Descole is Layton's brother separated from him at a young age due to adoption, and Leon Bronev is his biological father. Boy, where do we begin? First of all, there was absolutely zero build-up to the reveal. It was never even foreshadowed that this was the case, and if there was, it was done with such subtlety it would put the Ass Pull of Frozen to shame. At least with Don Paolo, Layton figured out halfway through that he was an old classmate of his, but Descole needed to tell him straight to his face how he knew him. Another thing about this reveal is that Layton doesn't even remember him, which could have been easily forgiven if Layton had been a newborn baby with poor memory span at the time (come to think of it, why didn't Level-5 make it so?!), but that's the thing; he wasn't! He was around 5-7 years old, at that point, how could you have completely forgotten you have a brother?! To add insult to injury, Layton is supposed to be an intellectual who acknowledges small details that go unnoticed by most, but he forgets something as crucial as that. Another thing was how utterly poorly Emmy's betrayal was executed. Her reason? "Uncle Leon is all I have left in this world"... nothing more, nothing less. What the hell? I expected a flashback or such of Leon taking her in so we'll know how, but there's absolutely nothing explored on this matter. The only thing I really liked about the ending was that Layton told Leon to piss off (in his kind manner, but still) because he selfishly gave them up for adoption for his archeological research due to a promise to his dead wife. Unfortunately, this isn't enough for me to make up for the piss poor conclusion of an otherwise great gaming series.

Noa JM: Another day in Team Fortress 2 has the release of 'Blood In The Water' which features more hilarious hyper masculinity hijinks and more much needed backstory, but the most egregious example of all is that the fact that the Sniper is revealed to be not actually Australian, but New Zealand... lian? Anyway, this is annoying because his character was designed to be based on the stereotype of how an Australian was seen by the general American public and this is the TF2 Team giving the finger to the designers and artists who had spent many years of hard work designing his character. Which, to be fair, was thrown out the window when Valve decided that the Chuck Norris and 'Australians are manly' meme was funny despite it being out of date for several years, and introduced Saxton Hale and the subsequent comics that say that Australia is full of manly things and mustaches and who knows what else. But the point is, the comics are just unnecessary filler and now that they've destroyed an integral part of the Sniper's character, it is hard to look at the game and its community any more who insist on shoveling in lame jokes hoping that it would reach meme status, like their earlier works. Do note that this is merely the straw that broke the camel's back - I had thought that the game was slowly sliding downhill for years ever since the Sniper Vs Spy update. To summarize, what an insult to nine years of work - people toiled to bring a funny and stereotypical representation of a nationality, and it was changed in a heartbeat despite all evidence to the contrary. Shame on you Valve. Stop focusing so much on TF2 and bloating the plot with stupid, pointless backstories and let the cash cow rest.

InTheGallbladder: Ah, Professor Layton vs. Ace Attorney. A fun game, maybe a bit dumbed-down on a few counts, but with an engaging story... that's mercilessly trampled into the dirt by its own epilogue. Turns out Labyrinthia is not a fantasy land, but a massive conspiracy that the Storyteller has been keeping under wraps for about a decade. Okay, odd, but given the Schizo Tech in earlier chapters, I can't say it came out of nowhere. It does, however, provide the setup for something stupid enough to single-handedly decimate the whole storyline: all the history, woes, and motivations of Labyrinthia and its inhabitants owe to the Storyteller trying to help Espella get through her childhood trauma with a succession of increasingly grandiose lies. Never mind that him lying to her is what caused the trauma in the first place. This culminated with him knowingly running roughshod over the lives and memories of Espella, Darklaw, and Newton. And yet, he still earns his happy ending.

Mieu: I absolutely loved Professor Layton vs. Ace Attorney. But the ending completely ruined it for me, and when I replay it, I will just not play the Ending for two reasons: One, pretty much all of it is a click along. There's like two puzzles thrown in and the rest is a huge reverse exposition dump with the player as Phoenix occassionally making very easy deductions. Two: Everything is just a ruse to deal with and "solve" the never before mentioned childhood trauma of Espella! I loved that people actually died, but from the moment that Maya died on, I knew it wasn't going to be as epic as I'd hoped. But the ending was thoroughly anticlimactic, with a stupid last minute backstory and the magic not being real. I was hoping for so much more.

Lance Omikron: I really loved the F.E.A.R series, mainly due to how immersive the first two games are, especially the first. The action sequences made you feel like a badass with a plethora of guns and melee moves, and the horror sequences were impressively scary and made you question if your badassery would truly protect you. This all changed in F.E.A.R. 3. In F3AR, you have to earn experience to use the melee moves that are available right from the start in the other games, and one playthrough of the single-player mode will maybe get you enough to unlock only one move. Killing enemies causes achievement progress notifications to pop up on the screen, absolutely killing the game's immersion due to constantly reminding you that, yes, you're playing a game. But the actual DMOS that I'm building up to is... the Collectible Alma Dolls. Yes, each level contains a collectible doll made in the likeness of the series' main antagonist. Collect them all for an achievement! Horror games thrive on immersion, and if there's anything that can permanently destroy it, it's stupid, gimmicky, cartoony collectible items. To me, the Alma Dolls are the tombstone on the F.E.A.R. franchise.

darkrage6: Army of Two The Devil's Cartel has a really bad twist that casts a damper over the entire series. Salem is El Diablo, yep that's right, the same guy who would do anything for his partner and generally went out of his way to save people in the previous two games becomes a full-blown psychopath who has no qualms about killing innocent people in cold blood(starting with the mayor) and couldn't give less of a fuck about Rios or anybody else but himself. This is completely nonsensical and asinine in so many ways. First, the reason given for him turning evil is REALLY shitty, basically Alpha and Bravo want to escort a girl to safety and Salem is against it, saying she "isn't their priority", (this coming from the guy who saved several civilians in 40th Day)after some persuading he reluctantly goes along with it, and his car gets hit by a rocket and everyone presumes him dead, and he essentially hates them for choosing the girl over him, I can understand him being upset, but turning against his own organization and his own fucking partner? No, just no.

N Troper: I'm quite a fan of the Neptunia series, getting started in it through the Re;Birth games released on Steam. The humor is one of the best I've seen, the characters are quite charming and the writing is better than what outward appearances would suggest...with the exception of Anonydeath's character arc in Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory or Re;Birth 3. This is a villain that actively invaded Noire's privacy along with hacking an entire nation's network, aided in the kidnapping and experimentation of CPU Memories in children, helped throw Gamindustri into disarray for his own amusement and brainwashed Peashy for 10 years, altering her memories and forcing the heroines to fight her, outright gleeful at their horror when they found out they've been fighting Peashy for all this time. What does he get for it? NOTHING. In the end, he is allowed to freely roam Gamindustri with no punishment for his crimes whatsoever, in a game where every other villain had what was coming to them or were given actual, proper redemption. Not to mention every character firmly grasps the Idiot Ball whenever he is featured. At one point, Nepgear, a tech genius that KNOWS that Anonydeath is a capable hacker, doesn't think about implementing a jamming device to prevent further hacking until they get hacked by him AGAIN in a scene that ends with the party having to SAVE him from fake Noires that he openly admits to molesting, blackmails Noire afterwards into saying she did it all for him with the promise of deleting his "Noire folder" when at this point he's tricked them all enough that Noire would normally be clever enough to not trust him to do so and Plutia, who DESTROYED Arfoire mentally because she kidnapped IF, Compa and Peashy, openly voices that he is cool because of how easily he gets under Noire's skin like she conveniently forgot his brainwashing of her adoptive daughter. All in all, Anonydeath was the absolute low point of what was otherwise a fun game.

Ace Trainer Alicia: There's a lot that could be said about the absolute worst written quest in RuneScape history, "Hero's Welcome," but the DMOS specifically is the point where everything goes south. The quest starts off with preparations for the arrival of the titular hero V, who had been teased for a couple years beforehand as the newest god to join the diverse Runescape pantheon. He's built up to be this mighty hero-type who will always defend his people, and there's even a rousing ballad that plays during the scene when he arrives to greet his people... but the DMOS comes almost immediately after: He gets murdered almost immediately after being introduced, without ever getting a chance to do anything. What the hell, Jagex? You built up to introducing a new god and expected us to care about him only to immediately kill him off? Not only is this a staggeringly bad way to kill off a character, there's absolutely zero excuse for such shoddy writing, since previous quests have handled that sort of thing rather well to the point that even the death of the World Guardian's one-note Satellite Love Interest was bittersweet and tragic. To add insult to injury, the rest of the quest stops being at all about V and the Fremennik people despite being billed as being about them, instead choosing to focus on some random Dragonkin we've never seen before having a completely nonsensical pissing contest, as well as bloated, hamfisted exposition about a random Out Of Nowhere Elder Artifact as the World Guardian suddenly decides to go on a Roaring Rampageof Revenge for V's death, despite only knowing him for a few minutes. That's right, the entire plot hinges on the protagonist being enough of a suicidal moron with zero priorities to want to avenge some dude s/he only knew for a couple minutes—a reaction s/he never even has the option to have about the death of his/her own wife/husband! The entire quest is an Idiot Plot! And to top it all off, the quest is tone-deaf and laden with horrifically unfunny jokes, including post-quest dialogue in which a random innocent fisherman is blamed for V's death, resulting in his wife leaving him for his brother. Because an innocent man's life being ruined because of a false accusation, or in this case, because everyone is holding the Idiot Ball is just the most hilarious thing ever, right?

SCP Ihpkmn: I quit Runescape because of two reasons: the quest Firemaker's Curse and the third World Event. The former was a quest that was so utterly frustrating that it put me off playing the game for a month, full of frustrating fire puzzles that were almost unplayable because of the pathfinding system Runescape uses for firemaking, a Fake Difficulty boss fight which actually hit you harder if you had armor on, and a glitch which made the quest unbeatable until I logged out three times. The latter... it involved climbing onto the back of an apocalypse-bringing god who was going to devour Gilenor, the planet Runescape takes place on. It consisted of doing repetitive actions that weren't worth doing more than once a day, was swept by a faction of alleged militant atheists that most people picked because the actual popular factions in the game weren't represented, wasn't acknowledged at all by anyone outside of the event- despite it absolutely wrecking two major cities in the finale- and overall, stank.

Jaydude: A certain scene near the end of the third case of Justice For All. Phoenix has proven the identity of the true killer, and Franziska learns that her ordering a search of the killer's room played a big part in helping him catch them. Her reaction upon learning this? Banging her bench and calling herself an idiot for ordering a search. Yes, she's angry that her actions led to the conviction of the true killer, rather than the man she put on trial. She's furious that an innocent man wasn't punished for a murder he didn't commit, because the only thing that mattered to her was beating Phoenix in court, regardless of the consequences of her actions. To me, this is the point where Franziska crossed the Moral Event Horizon, and with her total lack of remorse for her actions in the next games of the series, she's pretty much been a Designated Hero ever since.

InTheGallbladder: I loved Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations, but there's one aspect of the game that still irks me even now: Near the end of "Bridge To The Turnabout" we find that Dahlia Hawthorne is being channeled. As even the case itself shows, this turns her execution into an extreme case of Might as Well Not Be in Prison at All. It also marks the point where the game wrote itself into a corner, as Hawthorne's final fate (condemnation to the eternal agony of being herself) clearly shows. In short, since her Death Is a Slap on the Wrist (a noteworthy exception to the rule) and there's nothing worse that can be done to her, she's a Karma Houdini as of "Bridge..." and could never have been anything but. Given everything she did in Trials, this is unacceptable.

AlienPatch: Agreed, it was infuriating, to say the least, to see her get away technically Scott-free after all she had done. Sadly, though, this is perhaps not the worst instance of unfair endings and ineffective punishments in the series. In Investigations 2 we get Ryouken Houinbou (or Shiran Dogen, if you prefer the unofficial translation), a blind serial killer who murdered around twelve people before Miles Edgeworth put an end to his career. In the past games, like Trials, we have seen people get sent to the death row for much less than what he did. However, here not only he merely got a life sentence, and has been in prison for quite some time without his life being at risk, as we find out later, he basically gets anything that he wants whenever he wants it, his dog is free to roam the place, has warden Miwa under pressure, and has many secret allies and henchmen who help him rule the place behind bars. Even worse, at the very end of the game he escaped from prison and appeared in time to save Souta from being gutted by Shelly De Killer, which means, if he wanted, he could have gotten out and resume his killing spree, or merely disappeared without a trace, at any time he pleased. In the end, he ended up returning to prison with Souta, but Dogen refers to it much less as a punishment, and more like going back home. All this proves that:

Punishments in the Ace Attorney universe are highly inconsistent, inefficient and unjust, as certain prisoners don't seem to have it real bad behind bars, and a guy who murdered someone, even by accident, might actually pay the price more than a guy who did even worse.

Police in this universe, as proven in past games in the franchise, are highly incompetent, as they not only let Dogen escape, but also lose important items and overlook dangerous activities inside prison (one inmate almost escaped successfully until Edgeworth and his allies found out about his escape plan.)

Prison is being run by Dogen and his cronies. And even after all that happened, chances are, things are not getting any worse for him.

Catmuto: My personal DMoS also comes from Case 3-5. The revelation of the murderer of Elise Deauxnim and how everyone treated it, I never had a shred of sympathy for Prosecutor Godot. I did not care for the murderer's (and writer's) saving-throw attempt at explaining his actions. It sounded like he was excusing himself. Especially since half of his reasons didn't apply to the situation he actually was in, after he first appeared in the game. Looking at the time-frame, he seems to have awoken in August or September and Dahlia was not executed until December, one month prior to Case 3-5. He had ample opportunity to demand an audience with her in the detention center, or prison itself, and get even the slightest of Schadenfreude by telling her that he had survived her poisoning him and simply go 'Nyenyenyenynenyeee' or similar. The murderer came across, to me, like a whiny excuse of a person who refused to move on from his past, tragic as it might be, and decided to wallow in his misery instead of becoming properly proactive; yet everyone acted like he was a poor man whom I should pity and feel sorry for. Also, he knew of the events that would transpire that night, well before things happened, but did nothing to prevent them. A weak reason is given of him wanting to Play The Hero. I never bought that reason. The entire ordeal could have been avoided, had Prosecutor Godot just burned the goddamn letter or exchange it for a different one. In fact, I was more appalled that not more emphasis was put on Pearl Fey who honestly couldn't have done any different, as said character did not know the full meaning of things. That was the character I felt sorry for in that case, not the what-they-called a Sympathetic Murderer.

Trialman: Spirit of Justice was a great addition to the Ace Attorney line-up, with some really compelling cases. However, the 4th case, while having a great set-up, and progressing quite well, ended up pissing me off with it's so-called Sympathetic Murderer. To put it simply, Geiru was intended to get revenge on the victim, solely because he chose a different successor. At the time, the victim was making noodles, which she assumed to be a type she was allergic to. As a result, she decided he must be snubbing her, rather than maybe making himself a meal, or even that he was making a different type(Which is what he was doing, as a way of telling her she can still make it in life, following her own path). Then she killed him, and tampered with the crime scene to frame the victim's chosen successor, specifically implicating a Split Personality who believed himself to be 5 years old. So she intended to get revenge on him, and ended up killing him in a fit of rage, attempted to frame someone who is a mentally a child and we're meant to feel sorry for her? Sorry, writers, but I don't consider this a sympathetic motive, or line of action, in the slightest.

Melancholy Utopia: In Spirit of Justice, my DMoS was one that boiled my blood to fever level of celsius. I don't exactly remember which episode, but it was when you played as Apollo in Khurain, and he speaks to Emma. He then has the gall to say religion and science are complete opposites... for motherf*ck's sake! No! They are not! Have you never read up on history, Goddammit?! You're a f*cking lawyer, for crying out loud! The Catholic church was the sole supporter of science in medieval times. Heck, many famous scientists, like Albert freaking Einstein and Isaac freaking Newton had faith in God themselves! The only religion we've seen in the game is the Khurainese religion which only relies on supernatural forces in their practices. Then say that the Khurainese religion and science are complete opposites, not religion as a whole! This is coming from a spiritual person who's uncomfortable with supernatural subjects and generally only stick to science to find research on how it lines up with her faith (for those wondering, I play the games for the crime-solving, not the occultism. In fact, it really annoys me how much of it there is in the games). And why did Apollo have to say it?! I love the guy, he's one of my favorite characters in the franchise. If a bad guy said it, it would've been fine. This installment was without a doubt the worst game in the whole series, for portraying religious people as nutjobs disregarding scientific measures. Sorry, Capcom, but you win my contempt this time around.

Mudapa: Xenoblade Chronicles is a great RPG. If you never heard of it, check it out. It's one of the most solid games on the Wii. But, one moment really ticks me off. So, when Shulk and friends enter the Bionis Heart, they encounter Lorithia, who has Melia's Brother, Kallian, under her control. After her defeat, she has her as well as Kallian are killed. In Melia's mind, Kallian speaks to Melia one last time, saying she's the last hope for the High-Entia.This is a truly emotional moment. But, it seems as no one heard Kallian (besides Melia), except Riki! What?! Kallian's Last Words were for Melia. Riki has no reason hearing it anyway. And, the worst part is that it was never explained how he heard! Just the fact how The Goofball of the group heard out of all of them, ruins an emotional moment.

Kaxis 19999: For me, the cutscene before you fight Awakened Saiki in The King of Fighters. It seems like you could fight Mukai at first, but then he's killed by Saiki for disobeying his orders! Trust me, you could have used him as a shield while you escape, but no, you decided to take the Villain Ball and kill Mukai for disobeying a single order! As if your situation hadn't already gone From Bad to Worse.

Interceptor: I find Hopkins FBI entertaining for all the wrong reasons, but the target range scene had me shaking my head in utter disbelief and is just utterly stupid by any standards. In order to get the next clue left by Bernie Berckson, Hopkins had to shoot a target five times, which already sounds enough like an obvious trap already. Behind the target is a live victim which the clue is attached to, and killing her presents you with the next clue. Here's where it gets truly asinine: there's actually an option to check behind the target beforehand, but the game tells you there's nothing there. There's not even the slightest Hand Wave to why Hopkins couldn't see or hear anything beforehand; the game acts as if nothing exists until you shoot the target. The worst part: it's the protagonist's fiancée Samantha who was behind the target the whole time. That's right, the game forces you to kill her in order to progress. The protagonist's somewhat nonchalant reaction (a rather casual and monotone "oh no") doesn't help the situation at all.

FalconPain: The endgame of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker is considered by many to be the high point of Ganondorf's characterization in the series, and I largely agree with that... except for one major misstep. A bit of context here: he obtains the full Triforce from Zelda and Link once the latter arrives. Ganondorf wants to revive the power of Hyrule and win it for himself, but King Daphnes intervenes, gets the Triforce before him and wishes for Hyrule to be destroyed forever. This makes Ganondorf go Laughing Mad, as he realizes that his plans are ruined and he is about to die. So he makes it his final goal to ensure that Link and Zelda die as well, and no longer holds back against Link. The fight starts, and Link swordfights a highly skilled Ganondorf while Zelda takes Link's bow and supports with stunning Light Arrows. And then the stupidity happens. Ganondorf rushes over to her location, puts one sword away and backhands her into temporary unconsciousness before drawing the sword again to face Link for the second phase. This... makes no sense. He is racing against the impending drowning of Hyrule and the act of sheathing his sword takes time. Why does he not simply strike her with it? It can't be a desire to leave her unharmed, as he is specifically trying to kill them. It can't be because she's a child, because he's going all out against Link. It can't be that he doesn't consider her to be a threat, as she has been filling him with arrows the whole time. It shouldn't be sexism, considering he was raised by an entire civilization of warrior women. Even the Doylist argument of antiviolence fails, since he has been striking Link with his swords repeatedly without blood or horrible implications. In fact, he could have easily struck her with the sword and it would not have broken our suspension of disbelief for her to recover for the third phase. In short, I am incapable of coming up with an even halfway plausible reason for him to go out of his way to punch her and it tarnishes an otherwise excellent final boss sequence.

SenorCornholio: I am easily one of the biggest The Legend of Zelda nuts out there; unless it's the CD-i games, you'll see me being absolutely proud to own most of the Zelda series...with one small exception: The Legend of Zelda: Tri Force Heroes. Now, they can freely get away with making the story an Excuse Plot that largely focuses on comedy; said comedy reminds me a bit of EarthBound and I like that. What instead kept me from wanting to progress was the fact that the game outright required friends to 100% the game, and even then they'd have to have perfect coordination together; if you played by yourself, you'd have to resort to using Doppels which...well, when you find yourself unable to complete the second world, it's telling, then, how tedious of a process it was. So after a good long time of not touching the game, I decided to look up some game footage to see what I was missing, and not only did the game seem to not get better with its gameplay (in fact it got worse), but the story itself actually left me disappointed. For reference: the Witch of Drablands, Lady Maud, cursed Princess Styla (totally not Zelda) with a bland and hideous gimp suit all because she hated the way she dressed. That by itself is a pretty petty reason to curse someone, but whatever; anotherfemaleantagonist in the Zelda series is welcome...unless your name happens to be Lady Maud. I know I'm not supposed to talk about entire characters, but this, is not, a character. This is a driving force for the plot, and nothing more. When you actually meet her, she reveals to have absolutely no threatening charm to her, thus wasting the idea for a vile witch in a lighthearted game. Now, I'm not saying she should be necessarily complex; several villains, including many incarnations of Ganondorf himself, fall under Card-Carrying Villain status quite often, but I was at least hoping she'd be at least a little bit of a threat. This old hag is not imposing like Ganondorf, Onox, or Demise, she's not clever like Veran, Vaati, or Cia, and she's not entertaining like Zant or Ghirahim; she's pretty much the equivalent of that one annoying old neighbor across the street who thinks she's hot stuff but really just annoys everyone surrounding her. On top of that, your first encounter with her has her siccing her "pets" on you in a Boss Rush, thus showing she has no intentions of proving her worth. And the Final Boss fight against her just seems so slow and uninspired, it's a wonder she even counts as a villain. She's so ineffectual that the king at the end of the game doesn't even press any serious charges for her crimes. Give the likes of Yuga credit: at least he did something in the story aside from kick it off, and had several excellent boss fights to boot. That, and EarthBound had Giygas. With Maud however, the crimes she's committed would only really offend two groups: the people of Hytopia, and Rarity. Other than that, this villain just plain sucks.

Kashimakitty: While the final battle in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has been criticized many times before, the ending itself stings a lot more for me. One of the things I've always liked about Zelda games is the colorful NPCs and seeing how their lives go on once the world is saved, with the ending to Ocarina of Time being particularly noteworthy for this. This game's ending, however, was easily the most anti-climactic in the series. Just to highlight how irrelevant every character other than Zelda is, one doesn't even need to free the Divine Beasts in order to get the Golden Ending. The only thing required is to see all of the memories of Zelda.

Schismatism: I'm a big fan of Bit Blot's Aquaria, from its Ecco the Dolphin-styled gameplay to its presentation of a world filled with races which each caused their own extinction, but the game completely loses it in terms of plot when it introduces the Walking Spoiler known as Li. It's a baseline example, in my opinion, of a Romantic Plot Tumor, which takes Naija's motivations (exploration, learning, curiosity) and throws them right out the window. Many a player was thrilled when, at the end of the game in the good ending, Naija's mother shows up and voices these concerns.

Catmuto: My DMoS for Nicole has to be the revelation on who the kidnapper is. Before entering the game, there's the case of disappearances and kidnappings of women on the campus, and you know that one of the dateable guys is the kidnapper. With only four guys, there's a 25% chance of being correct, even if one guesses. Now, I played the game and after an early, mandatory scene with one of the guys, all I could say was "It's you. Isn't it? I hope it isn't, this would just be way too obvious." And it turns out that I was absolutely correct, that guy was the kidnapper. I already have a tendency to predict plot twists before they arrive, anyway, so it's difficult to surprise me - but this was so blatantly, insultingly obvious that it makes me wonder if the creators of the game were honestly attempting to make the mystery section of the game actually decent.

Miracle @ St. Olaf: The way Max Payne 3 resolves the conflict between Max and Serrano is just awful in every direction. Serrano had taken a flying leap over the Moral Event Horizon by murdering an innocent, helpless woman in cold blood, and yet the writers somehow expected us to pity and root for him once he runs afoul of another, slightly nastier villain and gets tortured. Well, boo-fucking-hoo, Rockstar; the guy's a remorseless killer and he earned his bad karma legitimately. Further rubbing salt in the wound is that Max frees Serrano, allows him to take revenge on the doctor who was torturing him, and then... he just lets the guy go. Remember, seeing women get hurt is one of Max's biggest Berserk Buttons. He fled from New York to Brazil in the first place because he killed a mobster's son, without a second of hesitation, for the act of hitting a woman. Not only does he completely forget about what Serrano did to Fabiana, but his internal narration even has him admiring the evil fucker and hoping he survived (Though the fact that the building that he was in completely collapsed thankfully means there was practically zero chance of him surviving, but of course they Never Found the Body). If Max suddenly being okay with violence against women was supposed to be some attempt at Character Development, then I have to say Rockstar's creative team are even worse at writing than Joe Hazelwood was at captaining an oil tanker. Nevermind all the Fanservice in video games; if you want a compelling example of real misogyny in the medium, look no further.

Sammie1191: While I loved Fire Emblem Awakening, one particular moment in Chapter 13 pisses me off to no end. Marth is revealed to be Lucina, Chroms Kid From the Future, they share a tender moment, Chroms wife sees them and assumes hes cheating on her. Not only is this stupidly out of character for Childhood Friend Sully, Maribelle, who becomes a magistrate in most of her endings and Sumia, who slapped Chrom in the face in an earlier scene but Olivia puts more effort into saving a dog from Henry than fighting for her babys family! She pretty much just rolls over and accepts it! You know what this tells me? They dont trust their husband. The kicker? The Female Avatar is the only one who is remotely reasonable and trusts Chrom enough to let him calmly explain whats going on. Dont get me wrong, I ship Chrom with the Female Avatar, but why does she have to be the only one that doesnt assume hes cheating on her? Yeah, shes not happy about it, but she just calmly says I trust you, can you tell me whats going on, why cant the others do the same thing? The only one I can see this fitting is Olivia given how fast they marry, trust would be an issue, but the others have known Chrom long enough to know him better than that. It's just a stupidly out of character moment made to be a comedic moment when it wasn't called for.

bubblesishot46853: It's time to choose a side in Fire Emblem Fates. Naturally, if you want a fun, easy, lighthearted adventure, you side with Hoshido. Sure, there are a few untimely deaths, but nothing too big. So, we're almost done, and ready to fight Xander. Corrin's taking a beating and refuses to fight, that's fine. And Xander readies the killing blow... and suddenly Elise jumps in front and takes the hit. And she dies in Xander's arms. What...the fuck? This is supposed to be the happy-go-lucky easy path, not the tragic path! Worse, Elise's death does absolutely nothing. She wishes for Xander to be at peace, but Xander insists to keep fighting anyway, making her death entirely pointless. Yes, I know two of the siblings have to die, but why couldn't it have been Leo, since he has the legendary Brunhyldr? Or better yet, Camilla die, seeing as she's my most hated character? Overall, the story got unnecessarily dark from that point on, and Birthright's promise of a easy, light-hearted campaign became false advertising. It was an unnecessary dick move, and it made tons of people, myself included, completely shun Birthright. At least I have the comfort of knowing this doesn't happen in the other routes, and I can still pretend that Elise survived.

Dr Zulu 2010: I know that the localisation of FE Fates is rather controversial, but one thing who annoys me the most was in the Revelation path when they change the original dialogue from Saizou and Beruka's C support. In the original script, they both say about how they do to live up with so much deaths on their conscience; setting up a Birds of a Feather type romance between the two, and how NOA and Treehouse decide to do with this serious conversation? By replacing the entire conversation with ellipses. I understand the defense of this as being a funny moment between two silent types and don't get me wrong; I like humoristic moment in works of fiction, regardless of how dark the work can be. But not when it comes to the detriment of character development. If Nintendo and Treehouse doesn't treat a character heavy moment with a good level of respect and seriousness, then why should I bother with buying more of their products if they're gonna treat them as a joke?

Cyrena Peleman: How the second generation characters were implemented and done is horrible in general, with most of the kids understandably resenting their parents for dumping them in a Deeprealm until they were able to fight. This suddenly turns admirable characters into terrible parents. Ryoma of all people never tells his own son that he's the crown prince of Hoshido. Shiro, as a fully grown adult, basically wanders out of his Deeprealm and figures it out himself. That's right, wise prince Ryoma doesn't tell his own son that he's literally going to become king of Hoshido one day. It gets worse. All Ryoma does is tell Shiro off for being irresponsible and reckless. Maybe because he had no idea he was going to be running an entire country someday! That's just completely idiotic on Ryoma's behalf and demeaning to his character.

I Like Robots: I'm a big Fire Emblem fan, and I'm one of the people who considers Birthright the best of the three paths. It's a simple, pretty unremarkable story of good vs. evil, but it at least doesn't sink to the insultingly terrible writing of Conquest and has the best characterization for Corrin (a noble hero rather than a whiny lapdog of the Card-Carrying Villain). That being said, the lowest moment of the route for me was at the end of Chapter 15, when, if the Avatar doesn't have at least an A-rank support with Kaze, Kaze dies by falling into a chasm in a badly-written, out-of-the-blue way. Now, Plotline Death can be done effectively and serve as a Player Punch, given proper, earned buildup, foreshadowing, and motivation, and it's framed as a Heroic Sacrifice with Kaze saving Corrin's life, but considering this is not only suddenly robbing the player of a unit they have potentially trained up and may have gotten attached to as a character, there is absolutely no way to know about the conditions to save Kaze without looking it up on the internet, or through sheer dumb luck. Add on the fact that if Kaze dies, his daughter Midori is permanently unavailable for the rest of the playthrough. All in all, this feels like a cheap stunt to try and force some kind of Tear Jerker out of the audience, but ends up nothing short of random, confusing and frustrating.

Tropers/cookieman: Fire Emblem Heroes usually integrates units into the story by putting them under "contract slaves" under one of the villains, Veronica. Yeah, it's the plot of Book 1's story and although it's a bit generic, it's understandable. Book 2 has Veronica team up with an evil king, Surtr, however, and for the first portion of the book, she provides him those contracted troops. However, Veronica ends up disagreeing with him, and then she ends up getting put as a sacrifice. But the point is that there's signs of horribly bad writing when it comes to these contracted forces, one moment in Book 2 Chapter 7-5, where Surtr KILLS one of the main characters's sisters in front of them, and those contracted troops (particularly from Thracia 776) still come out to get you ... with freaking Surtr there as well. There's absolutely no explanation on who enslaved those heroes, and what's worse is that previous battles with Surtr have been him with other Muspell generals and generic enemy units, making this one very hard to really understand. All in all, the "contracts" have gotten really bad to explain, and it just seems like they're just excuses to pointlessly integrate them in the story.

Dr Zulu 2010: Book 2 may be an inprovement over book 1 as far as storytelling but the final stage of chapter 10 may be the most frustrating and pointless chapter ever. Basically, Fjorm tells them about something called the "Rite of Frost", which has the power to cancel Surtr's invicibility. However, that requires the person performing the rite to sacrifice their lives. So, they finally use this power and... it fails. Surtr got ressurected meaning that Fjorm performing the rite ends up being a Senseless Sacrifice, slowly dying from the rite. And guess what? Book 3 has no mention of what happened to her, implying that she dies offscreen with not even a handwave. If the reason for why she isn't mentionned in Book 3 is because you can play it before Book 2, then just have her staying in Nifl to help her siblings to rebuild their kingdoms while making peace with Muspell and not making her suffer the rite of frost. Don't make her secretly dying where there is not payoff after all.

contrafanxxx: While Project X Zone 2 was a good game, I have a few gripes with it. One problem I have is Kogoro Tenzai and Mii Koryuji not being around for the sequel. Honestly, Mii in particular was built up to be the main character of the Project X Zone series, but instead, they throw both Kogoro and Mii out the window and replace them with Reiji Arisu and Xiaomu back as the lead characters. I don't mind Reiji and Xiaomu, but honestly, they should have had Kogoro and Mii return once again. Just as long as they don't become an Official Couple, despite the Crosspedia saying that Mii had a bit of a crush on Kogoro. And to top it all off, the biggest "fuck you" Bandai Namco could give to Kogoro and Mii and their fans is that the Koryuji mansion is featured briefly in the second game, yet the two don't even make an appearance, they're only mentioned in passing. Another problem I have is that they chose the wrong theme for Ingrid. Instead of "Heat Haze", they chose "Seek No Escape" from Street Fighter Alpha 3. You couldn't have her use her real Leitmotif, Capcom? What the hell were you thinking? Besides, she debuted in Capcom Fighting Evolution first, not Street Fighter Alpha 3.

SorPepita: Bioshock Infinite is and probably will always be my favourite videogame story of all time, but I believe they screwed up royally when retconning Daisy Fitzroy's motivation. Before the retcon, she was an excellent example of how one person can fight monsters while still being a monster herself, and anyone who doesn't think so can find plenty of examples in history (and there is one which greatly resembles Daisy's Moral Event Horizon of attempting the murder of an innocent kid despite what started as a noble crusade: Tsarism was hideous and revolting against it was fully justified, but the Revolution ended up killing Nicholas II's children, including 14-year old Alexei). But plenty of people complained that the Daisy they knew would never do such a thing (despite all previous interaction with her amounting to a single cutscene), and so in Burial in Sea we learn that it was all a plan to motivate Elizabeth into destroying Comstock. Apparently being kidnapped and tortured by him for the purpose of turning her into the Lamb who would destroy the Sodom Below wasn't motivating enough. Yeah, the new Daisy makes oh so much more sense]].

Charsi: In Game of Thrones: Ascent,Tyana's judgement was uncomfortable to go through even after several reincarnations. After Rona accuses her of being an enemy's spy, she doesn't bother presenting any proof of that, only mentions some letters she found, but burned by the time your character asks for them to examine (if she not outright admits she has no proof whatsoever, just felt like playing Hanging Judge), after your daughter Jayne, rightfully calling you out on injustice, tells she has taught Tyana how to write, thus would be able to tell whether the letters were Tyana's handwriting. Tyana is promptly imprisoned and her fate never gets resolution as far as we know, the not saintly, but usually Reasonable Authority FigurePlayer Character is Railroaded to be okay with this procedure and never gives her a chance to defend herself, prompting even Jayne to run away in an attempt to try and get proof of her innocence, and not even getting suspicious of Rona in the meanwhile, who has already made the decisions behind your back and calmly lets you take the heat for her actions. This seemed to be uncharacteristic naivete and disturbing abuse of power on your character part, who is renown for his/her compassion toward smallfolk and whose way of thinking and ruling is usually more modern than medieval. In fact, the Player Character's main appeal is that they don't just MST the tv series' plot, but actually show in the original volumes how to do it better. Hell, when Jayne, usually the Kate of the house, is the Only Sane Man, that says something about the rest of the cast...

Someoneman: Shukesoo's Tower from Fairy Fencer F. So there's this Fury on top of this legendary tower whose top has never been reached despote hundreds of adventurers trying. Of course you're going to have to climb it. Gameplay and Story Segregation aside (the enemies there aren't much stronger than what you've fought before), this isn't too bad, for the first two floors, at least. After that, Tiara and Harley inexplicably decide to stop fighting, leaving Fang to fight the remaining enemies on his own. And when Fang does manage to retrieve the Fury from the tower's summit (something that has never been done before), the girls have the nerve to start calling him an idiot. Sure, he was being arrogant, saying things like "Bow down to your god!", but they left him to fight these supposedly legendary monsters all on his own for no reason other than "they felt weird". If anything, he has earned the right to brag a bit about this. This entire sequence just made Tiara and Harley much less likable.

Pgj1997: While I thoroughly enjoyed Rhythm Heaven Megamix, I'd have to say the ending of the story really sucked. I don't know if this was in the original Japanese version, or if this was the fault of the localization team, but either way, it's bad. Tibby has finally reached his mother, who has turned a purple color and won't speak. After a List-of-Experiences Speech, Tibby's Mom still won't talk, despite Tibby asking multiple times immediately after his speech. A few seconds later, Tibby's Mom finally turns back to her normal color, and then talks. Apparently, the reason she turned purple was because she was holding her breath to get rid of the hiccups, which is how this whole kerfuffle started in the first place. What? After a big speech like that, with admittedly awesome music to go with it nonetheless, that's the note we're ending on? I get that it's supposed to be a joke, but it's just insulting.

The Lucky Cat: I enjoyed Baten Kaitos for the most part, but there is one part of it that spoiled much of my gaming experience. The ending. To put into context, once the final boss is defeated, the islands land below the taint clouds, Xelha unleashes the ocean and seemingly dies as a result, but the Meemais form together to become the whale, reviving Xelha, who reunites with Kalas and the others. All this is fine and good, and it's a good payoff after everything the characters have gone through. But then the dethroning moment comes - basically, Kalas turns to you, the Guardian Spirit and says what amounts to, "Thanks for helping me on my journey, but now you have to go home! Bye!" ...And that's it. After everything that's happened between the player, Kalas, Xelha and the party including having your memories wiped by Kalas and Melodia, his betrayal, siding wth Xelha to go back to Kalas when he redeems himself, Giacomo, Ayme and Folon blocking you off to fight him, killing a god together, and that's all they could think of as the final send off? Kalas doesn't even ASK the Guardian Spirit what they want, if they want to stay with him in the new world. He gets what he needed out of them and then pretty much just tosses them aside just like he did when he betrayed everyone, but because he's a good guy this time, he gets away with it. To add insult to injury, the characters then wave at you as the screen Fades To Black in a way that makes it look like even the characters are bored of this scene. Way to make an emotional impact, game developers!

matteste: While I am highly tempted to put the writing of the entirety of Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse here, if I had to pick a single moment it would be the alignment choice scene without question. To go into detail, let's start with the least shitty option first, the Massacre route option. Now in the game, while there are questions that push into one alignment, the game makes a huge failure in actually writing around that. It fully expects you to take the other route and as a result, if you pick Massacre, it will come out left field with everyone suddenly turning on you immediately (despite that some said they would support you no matter what you choose) fully intent on killing you where you stand. (Nozomi even pulls a fake "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight just to try and get a free shot in. Makes you wonder how deep that so called "friendship" really where, doesn't it). All of this while the Isabeau battle theme from the previous game just to try and hammer in that this was not the path you where supposed to take. Even the goddess of Tokyo squeezes out a faint "Why?" later on just to drive it in further. Now for the worse of the two, the Bonds route choice. Now while this one is more in line with the rest of the narrative and you are predictably forced into a battle with Dagda, it was here that Danu went from my hated characters list to my shoot on sight list. Understandably, Dagda is furious over you not keeping your end of the bargain so then he logically takes back the life he gave you. Now since Nanashi is the main character, there of course have to be some way to save him right? Of course there is, just have Dagda's mother Danu create a new Dagda that is subservient to her that can keep Nanashi alive. Not only is this morally questionable on several levels, despite Danu saying I Did What I Had to Do, it ultimately rings hollow due to the writing treating it as ultimately the right option and she never get's called out on this and the original Dagda goes on to be forgotten in favor of the doll she created in his image. Is it any wonder Dagda turned out the way he did with a mother like her.

Trialman: Okay, unlike some others, I do enjoy Castlevania: Judgment. However, the way they characterized Sypha in this game is absolutely horrendous. For this game, Sypha was turned into a fanatical Church Militant, who wants rid of Dracula's dark powers. The thing is, she takes it so far, she comes off as more of a Knight Templar. The worst case of this is in the story mode of Cornell, a werewolf who represents the idea that Dark Is Not Evil. His first rival battle is against Sypha, and the pre-battle dialogue shows the worst side of this game's version of Sypha. Cornell asks her if she's clergy, to which she gives a "None of your business" response. Cornell then politely asks if she can free him from being a werewolf, to which she responds with essentially, "You're a werewolf, you are therefore evil by default, so I shall kill you!" This moment really gets under my skin, due to how Sypha refuses to even consider that Cornell might be good, in spite of his friendly attitude, and explaining he doesn't want to be a werewolf. Worse still, one quote Sypha might say before fighting is "Brand me a heretic and I shall wear the title proudly", showing that she knows what it's like to be oppressed for what she is, rather than who she is, but then she does the exact same thing to Cornell. Never mind that she wants to destroy people with dark powers, when she uses attacks based on calling the spirits of the deceased, which should surely qualify as a dark power. Shame on you, Judgment writers, for taking a classic character, who hadn't been seen in years, and then beating her legacy and respect to a pulp. Also, they gave her massive boobs, even though she's known for being aSweet Polly Oliver.

ChrisX: Aside the boob part (which I'm more neutral with), I agree on this being one of the few things that made me unable to enjoy Judgment. Call it favoritism or such, but Sypha was one of my favorite Castlevania characters (or at least just the ladies), to see her being reduced to this, it feels like she got the short end of the stick. We may now revile Konami's pachinko obsession and business strategies, but this is saying something when Sypha's portrayal in the pachinko version of Dracula's Curse was more accurate and betterthan this! I wouldn't blame the fans if they say that Judgment!Sypha's personality goes straight into Fanon Discontinuity.

Dr Y 9 K: Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location and its stupid twist in the end. Before I go on, let me just say that for the most part, I found Sister Location rather disappointing. I was disappointed with the gameplay, the lack of cameras save for the Private Room, Ennard's canon design, and I was especially disappointed with the non-canon Custom Night. The only redeeming quality for the game was the animatronics themselves. But even that didn't last long. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you what may be the series' worst twist possible: the identity of Springtrap. For almost two years, we were led to believe he was actually William Afton, the series Big Bad, dead and revived. But then the creator released a cutscene, that pretty much confirmed he was actually Michael Afton, William Afton's son. What? You mean to tell me that Springtrap is not the Creepy AwesomeRobotic Psychopath I thought he was, but yet another innocent(?) soul? That was terrible! That was the worst, most character-derailing Ass Pull I had ever seen! It made me permanently disown the series and stop liking it! For so long, Springtrap had been one of my favorite animatronics, since I always saw him as the only legitimately "evil" animatronic. Now I can't look at him or enjoy him the same way anymore. The creator said he wanted Springtrap to return, and so did I, for a while. But now? I want nothing to do with him, or this age-old series.

Im Spidey 2: I'll have to agree with the Sister Location thing. While I still like it, I just don't find it as good as 1 or 3. It did mitigate my interest for the series a little, to be perfectly honest. It turned what was at least a somewhat-believable story into plain sci-fi. The Springtrap cutscene left me really divisive, but I'd have to lean to the negative. While it does excite me for the next game (hopefully a sequel), and while it was certainly an unexpected turn for Springtrap's character...I really would've preferred it if Springtrap were William Afton in the games, and Michael in the novels, not the other way around like how it happened. The sheer thought of an animatronic haunted by a Serial Killer just gets me going, and it did remind me of Child's Play in a way. But now he's just yet another tormented soul, with literally nothing different from the others, aside of having a corpse in him and that he's an adult. Really. I found FNaF 3 to be my favorite game, just because of Springtrap and the fact that it tied up loose ends so neatly. And then it got completely fucked over. I just hope the Robotic Psychopath gets to be played straight next game with William, and for said next game to finally give answers and just close up the story on an uplifting note - like how 3 used to do before it was savagely undone.

metalgearhemuli: The Midnight mission from World of Subways 4 - New York Line 7. The whole game is a fairly realistic subway-based Simulation Game until you reach this mission, where you have to avoid a fucking serial killer in a dark subway station, and the mission has fucking jump scares up the ass. What the fuck were they thinking, putting this kind of a survival horror mission that wouldn't feel out of place in a goddamn Slender game, in a fucking subway simulator? This is a genre with a rather niche audience, and I doubt they would enjoy this kind of an out-of-place mission.

KingBowser9001: I thought it'd never happen, but after dozens of hours of playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, I've finally come across a bad level. That well-deserved "honor" goes to The Lost Pilgrimage, one of the Korok Trials. Basically, you have to follow a Korok named Oaki through the forest to make sure he reaches the shrine at the end of the path in one piece. This normally won't be so bad... Except if he sees you, you're forced to restart. Yes, you read that right. Nintendo has actually resorted to an insta-fail Stealth-Based Mission in my Wide Open Sandbox. But whatever, you can just sneak around the trees, right? Nope, you're in The Lost Woods, where straying too far from the path leads to a faceful of fog. For grand prize points, Oaki is almost the same color as the grass, making it difficult to see him if you're not constantly using Stasis. Despite that, there are 2 main moments here that make this level a DMoS. First off, at one point, Oaki will suddenly stop, turn around, and run backwards. It happens fast, leaving you without much time to find cover. Even worse, you were probably following extremely close behind him to keep track of where he is, making it an even bigger cheap shot. It's also nearly impossible to tell how far Oaki can see, so even when hiding, you have to position yourself perfectly so as to not get seen or swallowed up by the fog. Shortly after that, Oaki moves along... Until a wolf howls. He then stops and calls for help. Well, hero, this is exactly why you were put up to this garbage mission! So go save him like you know you should! ...Except when you do, he yells at you anyway and forces you to restart. This was the one WTF-inducing moment in my entire playthrough of the game. Gee, game, sorry for answering his explicit cry for help like a normal person would! Ungrateful Bastard, indeed. Even though I haven't done everything in the game yet, this is so far the single worst level in the game for me. The fact that somebody actually playtested this and thought it would be a good addition to the game is bull, to say the least. It's the polar opposite of everything that makes the game fun. Good thing the rest of the game is pretty awesome, though, that's for sure.

Abodos: The most annoying quest for me was "Under The Red Moon". The quest requires you to be standing without armor on the designated pedestal when a Blood Moon is in the sky from 9 to midnight. But the Blood Moon appears at semi-random with the chances only increasing if you kill lots of enemies. This means that you've got to go around killing monsters while monitoring the sky at night to see if the Blood Moon is there. And if you don't arrive at the pedestal by midnight for the Shrine to appear, you've got to do this whole process all over again. Especially annoying because this is one of the quests you need to complete to see the resolution to Kass's story arc, which is genuinely heartwarming and satisfying.

treehugger0369 If we're talking stealth missions, for me it was the Yiga Clan Hideout. For one, this absolutely cannot be skipped if you're trying to complete all of the main quests; it's necessary to free Divine Beast Vah Naboris, as the Yiga Clan stole the Thunder Helm needed to even get close to the dang thing. You have to sneak around highly powerful Yiga Blademasters. This isn't so bad in the first room where they're relatively easy to snipe, but they're everywhere in the second room, along with treasure to tempt you into blowing your cover. If any of them spot you, the door to the next area will shut and you'll have to kill everyone in the area to proceed, and odds are high the Blademasters will One-Hit Kill Link. Did I mention Saving, Fairies, and Mipha's Grace are all disabled? And no, if you get lucky enough to kill everyone in an area, you can't cheese it by leaving the Hideout, saving, and then moving on; I tried that, and next time I reloaded everyone that I killed was back. The only way it was made tolerable was to freeze the most annoying guards with Stasis+ while having the stealth armor equipped so none of the others saw me. (Pro-tip: leave the treasure; it'll still be there when you beat the boss sans annoying guards) The "intended" (insofar as BOTW intends for you to do anything) way to beat the Hideout is to distract them with Mighty Bananas and then either just run past or Sneakstrike them, but waiting for them to spot the Bananas gets annoying, and trying to speed up the process by making noise runs the risk of them spotting you first. And just as salt in the wound, once it's beaten, you have the chance for Yiga Footsoldiers and Blademasters to just appear out of nowhere when you're roaming the land, in addition to the usual disguised ones(which get a power boost). The Blademasters in the field are nerfed compared to the ones in the Hideout, but it's still annoying when you're trying to parry Guardians near Hyrule castle(where the Yiga turds are the most common) and one decides to appear out of nowhere and team up with the Guardian to leave you in perpetual Ragdoll.

cricri3007: The ending of The Following. The main game ended on a bittersweet ending, so the expansion starts by undoing every efforts you made in the main game, sending Crane to the countryside to search for a cure. Then comes the Downer Ending: There is no cure. The only reason people in the countryside don't transform is because they've been infected with a special slower-acting strain of the virus which allows them to retain their human form and consciousness during the daylight. So, having found this "cure", you can decide to either nuke everything to destroy it, or try to return to the Tower where Lena can makes more of it or try to complete it. If you choose the second option, the Mother force-feeds Kyle an entire vial of the stuff and forces him to kill her, after which Kyle, delirious, still tries to make his way back to the Tower, slowly losing his mind in the process. And then he exits the sewer outside of the quarantine zone, where he kills or infect a mother and her kid, thus spreading the infection to the whole world. There's a reason it's listen on the Ending Aversion page. After an ending like that, I can only say fuck that ending for ruinign the whole game.

MsCC93: The ending of Ed, Edd, N Eddy: Jawbreakers!. I remember playing this game as a 12 year old and getting disappointed. The Eds get all of the raffle tickets, only to find the kids already eating jawbreakers. Eddy is rightfully confused as to why he didn't win, and it turned out that Jimmy had the winning ticket all along. As usual, Sarah and Kevin mock the Eds for not getting any jawbreakers. You would think that because this game is so difficult, that the Eds will have a happy ending, but no. It's just like the show when it's another Downer Ending. It's no wonder I don't have any nostalgic feelings towards this game now.

Doc Sharp: The Bed of Chaos boss fight from Dark Souls. It's a platforming-based Puzzle Boss in a game that doesn't lend itself well to any of those aspects, especially given the convenient bottomless pits that show up midway into the fight coupled with nigh-undodgeable attacks. It's rage-inducing, not creative, and basically something that just shouldn't be in the game, and I dread having to deal with it any time I replay an otherwise wonderful game.

batmany: I was really looking forward to the release of Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria Simulator (AKA FNAF 6) in the hopes it would finally wrap up some of the numerous plot twists and mysteries of the franchise. Well, the game was released earlier this week and....well, it makes absolutely no sense. The reason why is because it utterly contradicts everything established in previous games. The ghostly children being freed in FNAF 3? Nope, they're now possessing Molten Freddy! H Ow? When? At no point (apart from Baby) were any of the Funtime Animatronics ever haunted by ghosts. Remember in Sister Location how Baby didn't like being created for murder and wanted to be free? Remember how Elizabeth (William's Daughter) was an innocent victim of a tragic accident? Now she's daddy's little killer! Why? There was absolutely no indication that either had any interest in murder. And, speaking of Sister Location, now William Afton is Springtrap instead of his son Michael. Nevermind the fact that the Custom Night in SL strongly hinted that Michael was Springtrap and that the Freddy Files guide book even stated that this idea was entirely plausable. Speaking of Michael, he dies in this game by sacrificing himself in a fire with the other Animatronics. Apparently Scott forgot or is completely ignoring that Michael is cursed with immortality. Also, Springtrap survived a fire before so why would this one be any different? William Afton has gone from a evil genius serial killer who lurks behind the scenes to what can best be described as a poor man's version of The Joker. Fazbear Corporate went from being an incompetent if well-meaning company with some questionable business practices to a blatantly over-the-top corrupt one with no regards to safety whatsoever. I could go on and on about how this game did a piss-poor way of explaining things. I feel Scott was more concerned with trying to appease fans who were not happy with Sister Location's plot twists and haphazardly trying to wrap everything up in a neat little bow. Scott, please, if you ever make another FNAF game, give me "Miketrap" and "Freakshow Baby" and retcon this mess of a game out of existence.

DukeNukem4ever: Mine would be the fact that the mystery of the Bite of '87 and existence of Shadow animatronics went completely unexplained. Since this is (currently) the Grand Finale, I was expecting these things to become finally clear. But no, once again we have to draw suggestions what exactly happened back then. The creator pulled this trick back in Five Nights at Freddy's 4, and now he did it again. As much as I respect Scott Cawthon, I sometimes can't understand his logic. And apparently I am not the only one to think so.

Retloclive: The campaign for Gears of War 3 has a really annoying mishap when it came to the entire Sidequest of trying to locate some Imulsion fuel to get a submarine working. They first travel to the cities of Mercy and Char to find some fuel, which Mercy ends up as a huge tearjerker portion of the game due to Dom's Heroic Sacrifice, and they fail to get some fuel as a result. They then go to Char where they manage to get some fuel from Griffin's refinery company, and at this point, all seems well with the story. However, what happens afterwards is where this plot-line goes completely off the rails. They arrive at the Endeavor Naval Shipyard to find the submarine, and for some bizarre reason, they suddenly require fuel again as if the stuff they picked up in Char was just used to fill up the truck they arrived in. To make matters worse, it turns out that the shipyard had fuel anyway. Meaning that while they may have not known about it in hindsight, the entire journey that Delta Squad spent in Mercy and Char searching for fuel turned out to be completely pointless, and that Dom's death could have been completely avoided had they just gone straight to the shipyard. A whole section of this game just comes off feeling like complete Filler now, and it's not like there wasn't easy fixes to this. Like why did the fuel that Delta Squad picked up in Char suddenly become irrelevant? Or why couldn't the fuel they found in the naval base just be another part that needed to be replaced in the submarine? None of how this played out made any logical sense.

General Luigi: I didn't care for Xenoblade 2's seventh chapter in general, as I found most of its plot twists predictable—and not the good kind of predictable. The finale of said chapter took the cake, though, thoroughly souring my opinion of how well the game's plot was executed, which I found to be a real shame, as I liked the game's story overall. If my understanding of the plot's overall structure is correct, then this was supposed to be the finale to the story's second act, second only to the ending itself in importance—possibly even more important than the ending. I did not buyPyra being reduced to a vegetative huskfor a second, and considering Xenoblade 2's love of Seemingly Hopeless Boss Fights, I fully expected her to come back right when everything seemed hopeless and help Rex turn things around. I felt absolutely no suspense. While the worst part for me was without a doubt the trite and predictable double cliché of The Power of Love and what was, for all intents and purposes, a Disney Death, I also feel that the writers wasted a lot of potential by taking that route. I think they could have made an entire subplot out of trying to bring Pyra back, and it irks me that they went with such a cheap and overused solution instead.

Dr Zulu 2010: I admit that I enjoyed Heavy Rain ironically. But, even I can't enjoy the sex scene between Ethan and Madison. Granted, you have the choice to agree or not, but the fact that David Cage wanted to have Ethan and Madison ending together as the best outcome for both of them shows how he can't write his main female characters without being in a romantic relationship, no matter how non-sensical it truly is (Carla and Jodie are also big examples). But the thing is that it comes out in the worst moment possible with the dumbest of reasons; Ethan has killed a man (or spared him but ponders about it) while Madison not only barely escaped being killed by the mad doctor, but escaped a near-rape situation with Paco. I don't think banging the next guy you found who is a prime suspect and may think he might be the Origami Killer was a good idea. Also, when time is of the issue, the worst thing to do is to drop the clothes and rub your genitals together. I'm not against sex scenes in video games, but adding sex and romance for the sake of having sex and romance does not a mature game makes.

tsstevens: The WWE Video Games and 2K's utter refusal to fix the system breaking bug that, were the game to crash (which is often) all your save and install data will corrupt and you lose everything. Doesn't matter how many thousands of hours you put in or how much you try and sync the online saves, you lose everything and even though knowing about the problem for years nothing is done to resolve this issue. And just to rub salt in the wound 2K will promote super sales on their old games and in game currency and look boxes and price them higher than they were new, claiming the game is "special." Then, just when I began to let 2K slide and give them a fourth chance (after 2K15, 2K16 and 2K18) child exploitation may be extreme to say of their begging kids to not only gamble on loot boxes and microtransactions but the company begged them to pressure governments to allow underage gambling. EA may be considered the route of all evil in gaming but 2K cheerfully exploits children.

Aj Wargo: One moment Ive always hated was in the 2011 edition of Smackdown Vs Raw on Christians Road to Wrestlemania. Basically, Christian is participating at the Royal Rumble in his final ever match on the ECW brand against any of the meager cast of ECW wrestlers.... and then Dolph Ziggler shows up and interferes by distracting the referee, and his opponent chair-shots him, causing him to lose the match and his ECW championship. Not only does Dolph ruin what should be a milestone match in Christians career, he makes a bit of a rant before he starts ruining the match which I cant understand because he uses confusing slang- but my best guess is that hes saying that he doesnt think Christian deserves to be on Smackdown. Thats all? Thats extremely petty! Also, you can speak with Dolph backstage prior to the match and Christian calls him a nickname, which could also be the reason he interfered, which is even more petty! The worst part is, Christian isnt extremely angry at Dolph, and though he does get his revenge by beating Dolph on Smackdown next week, thats little justice for me! Dolph should have been suspended for doing that! And whats especially dumb is that the game takes away all control after Christians opponent chair-shots him, preventing you from even trying to kick out! If thats the case, why not just have a cutscene after Christian gets chair-shotted? You dont have to take all control away and spite us!

cricri3007 For me, OverwatchJumped the Shark with the release of Hammond. Not only is his design out-there and too cartoony, even by Overwatch's standards (the mech on its own is fine, but the hamster looks too stylized), but his backstory makes no sense whatsoever (so there was a hamster on that colony we were told was made to study primate in space, somehow nobody in Junkertown wondered why their Champion never appeared in person?), and a hyper-intelligent hamster stretch credibility too much. at least a sentient gorilla was somewhat plausible, and is a long-standing trope. He clashes as much with the rest of the game as Tinkerbell would in Westeros.

Duke Nukem4ever: Hunt Down The Freeman was already a disaster to begin with (albeit a bit Narmy one), but its ending is a complete joke. Adam, who turned out to be the real Big Bad of the story, gets killed in the space of a cutscene. Sure, Adam was a true villain of this story, but he was a Punch-Clock Villain at worst and I don't think he really deserved to die such a humiliating death. But this is not the worst part. The worst part comes when Mitchell confronts Adam in the end over what he did and starts listing the reasons for hating him. You'd expect, that Mitchell would rant about Adam killing his HECU buddies early on, tricking him into killing a lot of innocent rebels or, heck, even killing Sasha, a civilian, right? Wrong. All Mitchell rants about is how Adam betrayed him in pretty much the final level of this goddamn game. Sure, Mitchell is supposed to be a ruthless bad guy, but even he was at least uncomfortable when everything listed above happened. Even worse? After those reasons are listed, Mitchell says the next line: "You fucked up my face." That's actually what he says, word for word. You know this game sucks when its main protagonist puts his face being screwed above everything else that happened afterwards.

Saberwulf 2018: Call of Duty: Ghosts is easily one of my least favorite Call of Duty titles for good reason. The mid-credits scene is by far one of the biggest "fuck yous" a Call of Duty game has ever pulled on any player. Just when you thought you defeated Rorke and saved the day, Rorke suddenly appears out of nowhere, abducts you, and imprisons you in a pit in the jungle. Rorke was clearly shot in the chest with a .44 Magnum round. Who could survive any of that? And they have the gall to end this game on a cliffhanger? No wonder why this game failed.

Lemon_Starburst: For me, Bendy and the Ink Machine had been losing me for a while, but it completely lost me with its ending. To make a long story short, the game is implied to be in a time loop and it is never explained what happens to you and everyone else trapped in the studio. You get an item that lets you see things in the previous levels that were hidden before, but these things are at best easter eggs and bits of lore that don't really answer anything. It doesn't help that it seems to pull a "The Last Jedi" and outright ignored what it had been building up since Episode Two. Joey Drew? He's mended his ways completely offscreen and sent you to the studio to destroy Bendy. He's not even in the studio at all. The horribly monstrous Bendy that's been stalking you the entire game? He's just a creepy ink monster, not Joey like the game had been implying. All of the foreshadowing that there was more to Henry than we knew? Doesn't matter, we never see what happens to anyone after you finish off Bendy. Top this off with a lackluster final boss and you just have a disappointing finale to a really promising game. I know it's made by a small team, but it honestly doesn't feel finished once the credits start rolling—there are just too many unanswered questions to feel satisfied after beating it.

ImSpidey2: I used to love Five Nights at Freddy's back then, but nowadays I've grown out of the franchise as a whole, even beginning to dislike it due to personal problems I have had with the games. However, one major thing that made me gave up on the series is that apparently, the developer can't be settled with how the franchise goes. Scott Cawthon has made at least eight games in the series, some of which trying so hard to bring themselves as "the Grand Finale". First there was 3, which closed off some loose ends, but he never intended it to be the last game. Understandable. 4 was indeed intended to be the last game, but he wasn't quite satisfied with the conclusions the fandom came to. Somewhat understandable, even though he was sort of overestimating the fandom's bounds with that one. 5/Sister Location also intended to be the last one! And, he wasn't satisfied with how the lore ended off. Even this is also justified, since it ended on patience-thinning Cliffhangers. 6/Pizzeria Simulator ended off on a satisfying ending, but he didn't feel like he had a good enough experience. Yep, that's fine. And then, Ultimate Custom Night came up, and that's when the man finally said in a deleted Steam post that he is "finally happy" with how the series closed off. Good, that's the end of it, right? Actually, no, because, well, he's making another one, apparently, called "Into Madness". This time? No reason given. He just announces it and starts making it for absolutely no known reason. Even though he was already happy with the series ending, he decides to just drag it out even further for the sake of actual nothingness. Is this man just never satisfied with his own product? Is he willing to end the franchise over and over and over again, for increasingly specific reasons - thinning the patience out of his fanbase to the point where some leave like this one? To have children endlessly investigate "clues" for a continuation, to the point where they're never going to trust any series' actual ending anymore? "Oh, there's always gonna be more", they'll think. This is an unhealthy habit. Scott has to either admit that he will just continue making FNaF content, or actually end the story and drag on with non-canonical additions such as that one VR pile of toss he's churning forth. It's an endless cycle. For four years this franchise has went on like this, "concluding" time after time to pull the player into some illusion that it's all over with, only to come back up with another game that further drags the lore into absolute incomprehensibility, raising more questions than answers, endlessly taunting the player that "oh, you'll never solve it with this twist". There's Trolling Creator and then there's just completely letting oneself go. This is the latter. I know Scott may be making more for the fans, but at this point, there's no possible way to introduce new and coming fans correctly, without making a giant paragraph just like this one only to try and explain anything. And I know he's probably trolling the fans as a joke, but when it's repeated over and over, for years no less? It stops being funny a long time ago, and at the end of the day, there is just no satisfaction to gain out of the series apart from ditching it entirely and bouncing over to something more desirable, something that actually knows how to end a story definitively, something that can actually gain a player's trust rather than bait them with dangling objects in front of them. This "joke" has gotten far too old, and if the franchise has any hope of genuinely evolving beyond some simulation that has you using some giant plastic tat on your head and the series going to other platforms beyond Steam, this attitude should just stop. I still respect Scott as a developer, but this is just dragging the franchise against asphalt, and by this point it's a bloody hunk of mangled meat beyond repair. One that I refuse to indulge in anymore, no matter what happens.

Kirby 0189: I apologize in advance for the Sacred Cow tipping, but I in general consider Sonic 3 & Knuckles to be a terrible game. Since I'm not allowed to mention gameplay-related elements (Oh how I would love to rant about the stupid Ring Shooters from Death Egg Zone), I'd like to single out the ending for the Sonic 3 half. For those unaware, the game had to be split into two halves that can be locked together because of a rushed development schedule (the Sonic 3 half even had to have its manual pass off the enormous amount of glitches as "diabolical traps" set up by Eggman, yea the locked-on version did a great job of patching things up considering how I have an easier time breaking it than I do the "glitchy" Adventure games that are far, far better than any of the classics, although that might just be bad luck), and since they had to have the first half feel "complete" when they put it on store shelves too soon instead of waiting so they could guarantee they were giving people a good product without forcing them to buy a second game to fix their mess, they had to come up with an ending. What happens in this ending you ask? Well after Sonic or Tails defeats Big Arms, the Death Egg is seen falling from orbit and exploding in the background... somehow. And then our heroes just jump towards the screen and that's it. Aside from how it makes no sense for the Death Egg to just suddenly crash from a completely-unrelated machine being destroyed, there is absolutely no satisfaction to the ending whatsoever. For reference, Sonic the Hedgehog had a scene of our hero reuniting with all of the animals he'd just saved. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 had a scene of Tails catching Sonic from space. Sonic CD has Sonic save Amy and then free Little Planet. Sonic 3... just has the Death Egg be destroyed anticlimactically and it's treated as triumphant somehow. There's not even any sort of action to it, Sonic or Tails just stand there and watch as the knock-off Death Star falls from the sky before diving towards the screen in a segment that takes less than 30 seconds. That's not how you give your player a sense of accomplishment for finishing their journey, that's how you make them feel ripped-off because you decided to release an incomplete product and then make people fork over extra cash for a second game to seemingly fix it! Oh yea, and they kept this segment in the locked-on version, where it just feels like a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment.

Twilight Pegasus: One of my favorite games is Mana Khemia: Alchemists of Al-Revis. It's a lot of fun, with great characters, addictive gameplay, and an interesting story. Unfortunately, the character writing can be very inconsistent, especially in regards to one character that I really, REALLY hate: Pamela Ibis, the Cute Ghost Girl. She, I feel, is the main reason for one of the game's absolute dumbest moments ever. In one of her later character quests, she makes her own potion, forcing people to drink it, not realizing that the potion is making people sick, almost killing them. Vayne and the others manage to stop her from giving more people the potion, and she goes about her merry way. But what happens after this? Vayne's workshop buddies tell him to call out Pamela for her reckless endangerment of other students and make her take responsibility. Considering the type of character Vayne is, he tells her off as gently and politely as possible...and how does Pamela react? She cries and plays the victim. You'd expect the other kids to call her out on being a little brat and not taking responsibility for her nearly killing other students with a hackneyed potion, right? Nope! Instead, they yell at Vayne for "not talking to a woman more delicately" and daring to punish her, so Pamela is a flat-out Karma Houdini! This is absolute bullshit! Pamela is the one in the wrong, not Vayne! He didn't even insult her or yell at her, and he had every right to confront her on her actions! Not only is this an unnecessary Kick the Dog moment for poor Vayne, who did absolutely nothing to deserve this, the other characters are written to be out of character to the point of being uncharacteristically mean spirited, possibly for the sake of comedy, and it makes them come off as hypocritical when they were the ones who told Vayne to confront Pamela! This scene alone solidified my hatred for Pamela and forced me to acknowledge the game's uneven character writing. I still like it for what it is, and I play it every now and again, but this moment alone officially cemented Pamela as The Scrappy for me.

Izzy Uneasy: While it's no doubt that Ghost Trick is awesome, one moment that made me upset was the scene where Madame Emma hangs on the chandelier with no way to get down. Maybe it's just me, but I felt extremely sorry for her. Thankfully, credits show that Emma is alright.

Community

Tropes HQ

TVTropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from thestaff@tvtropes.org. Privacy Policy